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)

Chapter 4. Using Data

Now that we've seen how to process keywords, commands, and API calls, we will look at the next logical step in bot building: persistent data storage and retrieval. References to data can be kept in JavaScript by assigning said data to a variable; however, its use is limited to when the program is running. If the program is stopped or restarted, we lose the data. Hence, persistent data storage is required for certain tasks.

This allows us to build bots that can, for instance, keep track of a leaderboard or store a to-do list.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Introduction to Redis

  • Connecting to Redis

  • Saving and retrieving data

  • Best practices

  • Error handling