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 6. Webhooks and Slash Commands

Every bot we've created so far shares the same two traits: they rely on commands issued by users and require a Slack API token. This has been very useful in our bots so far, but what if we want a bot to post messages to a Slack channel without needing an API token? Plus what if we want a bot that does not require an API token to interact with users? An example of this is the GitHub Slack integration, a service that posts GitHub activity on specific repositories to a Slack channel of your choice.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to use webhooks to get data in and out of Slack and how to create slash commands that users can interact with throughout Slack.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Webhooks

  • Incoming webhooks

  • Outgoing webhooks

  • Slash commands

  • In-channel and ephemeral responses