Robotto

Overview

A simple starting point for creating a Beep Boop hostable, Node.js based Slack bot with Botkit.

Visit Beep Boop to get the scoop on the the Beep Boop hosting platform. There is also the Slack API documentation.

Assumptions

You have already signed up with Beep Boop and have a local fork of this project.
You have sufficient rights in your Slack team to configure a bot and generate/access a Slack API token.

Usage

Run locally

yarn # or npm install
SLACK_TOKEN=<YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN> GOOGLE_TOKEN=<YOUR_GOOGLE_TOKEN> OXR_TOKEN=<YOUR_OXR_TOKEN> npm start

Or, you can export your tokens as environment variables and run

npm run local

If you aren’t planning to use the Google or OXR scripts, you can always just export a dummy environment variable:

export GOOGLE_TOKEN=foo
export OXR_TOKEN=bar

I don’t test the Google translate scripts, because the translation can change from day to day, so I generally just use a dummy environment variable for testing.

After starting index.js you should get something like this:

[nodemon] 1.11.0
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching: *.*
[nodemon] starting `node index.js`
info: ** No persistent storage method specified! Data may be lost when process shuts down.
info: ** Setting up custom handlers for processing Slack messages
info: ** API CALL: https://slack.com/api/rtm.start
notice: ** BOT ID: nd ...attempting to connect to RTM!
notice: RTM websocket opened

I prefer using nodemon to keep re-running the script with every change to catch errors, but you can alter the start script in package.json if you prefer to.

Run locally in Docker

docker build -t starter-node .
docker run --rm -it -e SLACK_TOKEN=<YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN> GOOGLE_TOKEN=<YOUR_GOOGLE_TOKEN> OXR_TOKEN=<YOUR_OXR_TOKEN> starter-node

Run in BeepBoop

If you have linked your local repo with the Beep Boop service (check the project list), changes pushed to the remote master branch will automatically deploy.

Acknowledgements

This code uses the Botkit npm module by the fine folks at Howdy.ai.

License

See the LICENSE file (MIT).

ndarville / starter-node-bot

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