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)

The Slack app directory


In order to make adding apps easy for their users, Slack has created the app directory (https://slack.com/apps). This is a place to shop for apps and bots to add to your Slack team. Like other app stores available, every app submitted to the app directory is controlled and has to be approved by Slack itself to counteract spam and abuse.

It is possible for other teams to use your bot by means of webhooks, as we saw in the previous chapter. However, if you are trying to reach a wide audience and potentially monetize your bot, the app directory is the most efficient way.

The app directory makes adding new apps easy

The end goal of this chapter is to allow users to add a bot to their Slack team by clicking an Add to Slack button, which we will cover in detail later.

Let's start by registering an app. In this example, we will add the Wikibot bot, which we built in Chapter 3, Adding Complexity.

Note

Please note that our registering of Wikibot (and the use of the Wikipedia API...