Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Overview of this book

Slack promises that its users will "be less busy." Slack bots interact with users in Slack chatrooms, providing useful immediate information, and automating work. This book gives you everything you need to build powerful and useful Slack bots. You’ll see how to hook into the Slack API to create software that can read and post to chatrooms, respond to commands and hints given in natural conversational language, and build fun and useful bots for your own place of work, both as a front end to your own service and to distribute and share as apps. You can even sell your bots and build a business as a Slack bot developer. Throughout the book, you’ll build useful and fun example applications that you can modify for your own situations. These range from simple, fun applications to liven up discussions to useful, data-driven apps to help you make decisions quickly and manage work.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we saw how to install the prerequisite technologies, how to obtain a Slack token for a bot, and how to set up a new Slack bot project. As a result, you can reuse the lessons learned to easily scaffold a new bot project. You should now be able to program a bot that can send messages to channels, direct messages as well as craft basic responses. Finally, we discussed how to debug a Node.js-based bot using the iron-node debugger.

In the next chapter, we will see how to make our bot more complex by adding third-party API support and by programming our first bot command.