Build This Bot

I want you to build a bot. This bot. Build this bot.

You want me to what?

Have you ever wanted an automaton to call your own? The intent of this project is to make that dream a reality by guiding you through the ins and outs of bot building on Slack.

But why?

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, a team called Tiny Speck built a tool to communicate with each other as they worked. They felt frustrated by the amount of mindless repetitive tasks that slowed down their communication and productivity. As avid consumers of Sci-Fi and generally against things that made them frustrated, the Tiny Speck team built a special user in their messaging app: a digital user or a bot. Instead of forcing the intern to do these mindless tasks, they delegated these responsibilities to their new bot user and integrated the other apps they used into their conversations.

Eventually this communication tool became known as Slack, and their digital user, Slackbot.

Now you too can build a Slack Bot and free up yourself, your fellow coworkers, and even the customers using your products and services, so we can all get back to what we really should be doing; sleep work!

Let's get started 🎉

First you'll want to clone this project locally. This project is structured with different branches for different stages of the workshop, so you can add your own code and follow along. If you happen to run into a bug or get stuck and we're moving on you can check out the next branch and you won't be left behind. ✊

At each step, feel free to ask questions in the #help channel, or ask your neighbor if they can help! 🙌

To get started, check out the first branch

git checkout chapter-1

If you'd like to follow along without any of the code, all of the documentation for each chapter is located in the docs folder in the master branch.

• Chapter 1: Setting Things Up 👈
• Chapter 2: OMG OAuth
• Chapter 3: Handle Hello with Class
• Chapter 4: Message Buttons Magic
• Chapter 5: ABCs of NLP

Further Reading and Getting Help

Documentation

Slack Documentation

• Getting started with Slack apps
• Slack Events API documentation
• Slack Web API documentation

Documentation for Tools

• virtualenv
• flask
• python-slackclient
• Slack Events Adapter
• ngrok
• postman

Where to Find Help

Wondering what to do if you can't get this dang tutorial to work for you? The Slack Developer community is an awesome place to get help when you're confused or stuck. We have an excellent 'search first' culture and Slack is committed to improving our tutorials and documentation based on your feedback. If you've checked the Slack API documentation, reached the end of your google patience and found StackOverflow to be unhelpful, try asking for help in the Bot Developer Hangout Slack team.

Feedback

I'd love to improve this project, so if you've got some ideas 💡, feedback 🙋 or praise 💌 please file an issue, submit a PR or reach out to me through Github or on Twitter!

If you want to keep up with Slack platform updates chat with us on Twitter.