Slack Application

Quickstart for creating a slack application with Sir bot-a-lot.

Ngrok setup

For ease of coding we will develop our app locally but in order to do so we need a tool to be reachable by slack. For this we will use ngrok.

• Install ngrok.
• Start an HTTP tunnel on port 8080.

$ ngrok http 8080

You should now have access to the ngrok web interface at 127.0.0.1:4040 and see your http & https forwarding url (http://xxxxxx.ngrok.io -> localhost:8080).

Application setup

• Create a development slack team.
• Create a new app.
• Add the chat:write:bot & channels:read permissions to your application from the OAuth & Permissions page.

• Install the application to your workspace (Preferably on all public channels).
• Grab the Verification Token from the Basic Information page.

• Grab the OAuth Access Token from the Install App page.

Sir Bot-a-lot installation

Sir Bot-a-lot is on PyPI.

$ python3 -m venv .env      # Create a virtual environment
$ source .env/bin/activate  # Activate the virtual environment
$ pip3 install sirbot       # Install Sir bot-a-lot

Starting the Bot

• Copy the code in a bot.py file and fill the OAuth Access Token & Verification Token.

import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

from sirbot import SirBot
from sirbot.plugins.slack import SlackPlugin

OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN = ''
VERIFICATION_TOKEN = ''

bot = SirBot()

slack = SlackPlugin(token=OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN, verify=VERIFICATION_TOKEN)
bot.load(slack)

bot.start(host='0.0.0.0', port=8080)

• Start your bot

$ (.env) python bot.py

Now that your bot is running we can start sending it events.

• Go back on your application configuration page (click here to find it back).
• Add the Event Subscriptions feature. Set the url as your ngrok url (http://xxxxxx.ngrok.io).
• If everything is ok the url should be marked as Verified.
• Add the message.channels event to the subscription.

• Type a message in your slack channel and you should see it coming in the logs.

sirbot.plugins.slack.endpoints - DEBUG - Incoming message: Slack Message: {'type': 'message', 'user': 'U29163YQH', 'text': 'test message', 'ts': '1519907093.000242', 'channel': 'C5MKJ21QR', 'event_ts': '1519907093.000242'}

Answering messages

Once we receive message the next step is to start answering them. For that we need to add some code to bot.py.

...

from slack import methods # Enum of the slack endpoints for better autocomplete

...

# We create function that will be called on incoming message
# The parameters are the incoming message and the aiohttp app
async def hello(message, app):

   # We create a response object from the incoming message
   response = message.response()

   # We set the text of our message
   response['text'] = 'Hello <@{user}>'.format(user=message['user'])

   # We querry the slack api chat.postMessage with our response
   await app['plugins']['slack'].api.query(url=methods.CHAT_POST_MESSAGE, data=response)

...

slack = SlackPlugin(token=OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN, verify=VERIFICATION_TOKEN)

# We register our function to respond to message starting with ``hello``
slack.on_message('^hello', hello)

bot.load(slack)

...