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)

Simple to-do example


With the basics of Redis covered, we shall now move on to create a simple to-do Slack bot. The aim of this bot is to allow users to create a to-do list, allowing them to add, complete, and delete a task from this list as they go about their day.

This time, we will start with a skeleton of what we want and build each feature step by step. Start by adding this new command to your bot:

bot.respondTo('todo', (message, channel, user) => {
  let args = getArgs(message.text);

  switch(args[0]) {
    case 'add':
      
      break;

    case 'complete':
      
      break;

    case 'delete':
      
      break;

    case 'help':
      channel.send('Create tasks with \`todo add [TASK]\`, complete them with \`todo complete [TASK_NUMBER]\` and remove them with \`todo delete [TASK_NUMBER]\` or \`todo delete all\`');
      break;

    default:
      showTodos(user.name, channel);
      break;
  }
}, true);

function showTodos(name, channel) {
  client.smembers(name, (err, set...