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)

Registering your app and obtaining tokens


Certain unique tokens are required in order to successfully authenticate with Slack's OAuth servers. This is necessary so that Slack can determine whether we are who we say we are and whether our app or bot is actually integrated with the team we are attempting to get access to.

We start by navigating to the Slack new app registration page at https://api.slack.com/applications/new. Fill out the form by picking a name for your bot, the team it originated from, descriptions of your bot, links to help pages, and a redirect URI:

Be as descriptive as you can when filling out this form

After saving your settings, you can choose to set up a bot user, webhook, or slash command. For Wikibot, we will be setting up a bot user.

If your specified username is taken, Slack will edit it slightly to avoid conflicts

Once you've saved your changes, you should be presented with OAuth information on the next screen. First, make sure to save the Client ID and Client Secret...