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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Create powerful, useful, fast, and fun chat bots that make Slack better
About This Book
- This is the first developer's guide to programming for Slack
- It covers everything you need to create chat bots for Slack's conversational UI
- It's full of realistic examples, usable code, and lucid explanations on everything you need to know
Who This Book Is For
This is a book for software developers who want to build Slack bots for their own company's use or for customers. You need to know JavaScript.
What You Will Learn
- Receive and send messages sent in Slack
- Respond to user commands
- Process natural language
- Perform useful tasks on commands such as fetching data from external sources
- Use webhooks and slash commands
- Create a Google Classroom and add customized information for each individual class
In Detail
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.
Style and approach
This is a friendly step-by-step guide to building powerful, friendly Slack bots.
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Seitenzahl: 177
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Building Slack Bots
Building Slack Bots
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: June 2016
Production reference: 1170616
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78646-080-6
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
Paul Asjes
Reviewer
Nicolas Grenié
Commissioning Editor
David Barnes
Acquisition Editor
Usha Iyer
Content Development Editor
Mehvash Fatima
Technical Editor
Siddhi Rane
Copy Editor
Roshni Banerjee
Project Coordinator
Kinjal Bari
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Graphics
Kirk D'Penha
Production Coordinator
Shantanu N. Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu N. Zagade
About the Author
Paul Asjes started programming on his TI-83 calculator in high school and has been hooked ever since.
Specializing in JavaScript, he is always interested in staying up to date with the latest developments in the field. Currently, he is building universal full-stack apps with technologies such as React, Webpack, and Node when he's not spending far too much time on Slack.
Since his IRC days, he has been interested in chat bots and how they can be used. He has written several Slack bots to date, ranging from bots that facilitate playing games to bots that retrieve important business metrics.
I would like to thank my wife, Caitlin, for being my biggest fan, proofreader, and muse during the writing of this book.
About the Reviewer
Nicolas Grenié is a hacker-in-residence at 3scale, living between Barcelona and San Francisco.
Nicolas built his first website in 2000 using Microsoft Word and since then has not stopped learning about programming.
This API freak likes to try new languages and APIs all the time. He has built many integrations for Slack and Amazon Echo. He runs a good number of meetups in Barcelona about APIs, Meteor, and entrepreneurship.
When he isn't working, you have a good chance of finding him hacking side projects or enjoying a good craft beer. And, of course, as he is French, frogs and snails are part of his daily diet!
I want to thank Steven Willmott, the CEO of 3scale, and the entire 3scale team for giving me the inspiration and time to hack interesting projects and technology.
I also want to thank my parents and family for the positive learning environment they've built, letting me explore my passion and curiosity for technology.
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Preface
Chat bots have become big talking points in the world of business and software development. On the forefront of team communications is Slack, a platform for talking to colleagues and friends about absolutely anything. The engineers at Slack saw the potential and have designed a system that allows anyone to build their own Slack bots for productivity, ease of use, or just plain entertainment.
This book will teach you how to use a myriad of tools to build the very best bots for the Slack platform. Whether you are a programming beginner or a seasoned veteran, by the end of this book, you will be able to create high-quality bots whose only limit is the your imagination. You might also pick up a few tricks along the way.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Slack, shows you what is Slack and why we should care about Slack bots.
Chapter 2, Your First Bot, takes you through building your first bot and explains how it works.
Chapter 3, Adding Complexity, helps us expand our first bot with new and useful functionalities.
Chapter 4, Using Data, teaches you how to use persistent data with your Slack bots.
Chapter 5, Understanding and Responding to Natural Language, teaches you about natural language processing and how to develop a bot that can comprehend and respond in natural language.
Chapter 6, Webhooks and Slash Commands, takes us through the uses of webhooks and Slash commands in a Slack setting.
Chapter 7, Publishing Your App, teaches you how to publish your app or bot so that it can be used by others outside your company.
What you need for this book
You should have an intermediate understanding of JavaScript and programming concepts in general. For this book, we will be using Node.js version 5.0.0. This means that the JavaScript code samples contained within will use ECMAScript 2015 (ES2015, more commonly known as ES6) features, which have been enabled in Node v5.0.0. For a full list of ES6 features enabled in Node.js version 5 and up, visit the Node.js website (https://nodejs.org/en/docs/es6/).
This book, its techniques, and the code samples within are OS-agnostic, although for debugging purposes, either the Google Chrome or Opera browser is required.
Who this book is for
This is a book for software developers who want to build Slack bots for their own company's use or for customers.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Save the file and then run the code via iron-node in your terminal."
A block of code is set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Either click on the Step over button in the top-right corner, symbolized by an arrow curving around a dot, or hit F10 to step over to the next line."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Downloading the example code
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Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:
The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Building-Slack-Bots. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
Errata
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.
Chapter 1. Getting Started with Slack
This book will enable a beginner to create their own Slack bot either for amusement or professional purposes.
The ultimate goal of this book is for you to think of Slack as a development platform with great potential, rather than simply a chat client. As Slack continues its meteoric rise in popularity in the developer community, the possibilities and opportunities contained in Slack apps will prove to be a valuable tool in any developer's toolbox.
In this chapter, we introduce you to Slack and its possibilities. We will cover:
Introduction to Slack
Launched in August 2013, Slack started as an internal communication tool utilized by small teams but has been rapidly morphing into a versatile communications platform used by many parties, including the open source community and large businesses.
Slack is a real-time messaging application that specializes in team communication. In a crowded space of productivity applications, Slack sets itself apart by providing extensive integrations with popular third-party apps and provides users with the platform to build their own integrations.
As of the beginning of 2016, Slack is used by approximately 2 million users daily, and spread across 60,000 teams that send 800 million messages per month (http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/slack-statistics/). Some of the more well known companies who use Slack include Airbnb, LinkedIn, and The New York Times. This service has become so popular, largely thanks to its impressive uptime rate of over 99.9 percent. What sets Slack apart from competition such as HipChat or Skype for Business is the determination of the company to open its platform for third-party developers in the form of an application program interface (API). To spur the growth of their service as a platform, in December 2015 Slack pledged to invest $80 million into software projects that use its technology (http://fortune.com/2015/12/15/slack-app-investment-fund/). Added to the more than $320 million raised in funding for the company, it's safe to say that Slack will continue to be a driving force in the team productivity space in the years to come.
Slack as a platform
What many users perhaps don't know about Slack is that underneath the messaging client, a highly extensible platform exists that can be used to create apps and business tools that can simplify the development cycle, perform complex tasks, or just be downright silly.
Slack's UI with its own Slack bot in action
This platform or API can be utilized to integrate third-party services into Slack's platform and leverage their extensive reach and user friendly interface. The said third-party applications can send data into Slack via incoming webhooks, execute actions outside of Slack with commands, or respond to commands as a bot user. The bot user or bot is the most interesting; they are so named as they can mimic human users by performing the same actions that any human can.
Note
Slack bots are software applications that run on the Slack Real Time Messaging (RTM) platform. Bots can be used to interact with external applications or your custom code in a conversational manner.
Some of the more popular bots include GitHub's multitasking Hubot (https://hubot.github.com/) and Meekan's scheduling bot (http://meekan.com/slack/), but many more of varying complexity are developed each day.
The most obvious and well known bot is Slack's own Slack bot, used for built-in Slack functions such as:
Another widely popular bot is Hubot. Originally developed by GitHub and ported to Slack by Slack themselves, Hubot can provide useful functionality such as GitHub activity tracking, which can keep you up to date with GitHub repositories.
GitHub integration showing branch and pull request activity
You can also add infrastructure monitoring through Jenkins:
Jenkins integration bot showing build automation logs in Slack
Bots can transform Slack from a simple messaging client to an important business tool, benefitting any company that uses custom bots unique to their workflow. The beauty of the Slack platform is that anyone can create a functional bot in a few simple steps.
The end goal
Upon completing this book, the reader will be able to build a complex Slack bot that can perform the following tasks, amongst other things:
Summary
This chapter gave you an overview on what Slack is, why it is noteworthy, and how its platform can be leveraged to create a myriad of useful apps. The next chapter will show you how to build your first simple Slack bot.
Chapter 2. Your First Bot
Readers will be amazed at how few lines of code are required to get a basic bot up and running in their Slack environment. This chapter will walk the reader through the basics of building a Slack bot:
Although some of the concepts first outlined will be known to a more advanced reader, it is still recommended to read through the first few sections of this chapter to ensure that your environment is up and ready to go.
In this chapter, we will build a bot that performs the following actions:
Preparing your environment
Before we can get started with the first bot, the programming environment must be set up and configured to run Node.js applications and packages. Let's start at the very beginning with Node.
In brief, Node.js (also referred to as Node) is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's v8 JavaScript Engine. In practice, this means that JavaScript can be run outside of the usual browser environment, making JavaScript both a frontend and backend language.
Google Chrome's v8 JavaScript engine ensures that your JavaScript code runs fast and efficiently. Unlike in the world of browsers (and excepting Node versions), Node is maintained by a single open source foundation with hundreds of volunteer developers. This makes developing for Node much simpler than for browsers as you will not run into problems with varying JavaScript implementations across platforms.
In this book, we will be using major Version 5 (any version starting with 5) of Node. This allows us to use the newly implemented features of ECMAScript 2015 (better known as ES2015 or ES6). Whenever an ES6 feature is used in this book for the first time, look for the accompanying code comment for a brief explanation on the feature.
Note
Although many are implemented, not all ES6 features are currently available in Node and some are only available in strict mode. For more information, please visit the Node ES6 guide: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/es6/.
This section will briefly explain how to install Node.js and the Slack API on your development machine.
Installing Node.js
To install Node.js, head to the official Node website, https://nodejs.org/, download a v5 version and follow the onscreen instructions.
To test whether the installation succeeded, open up a terminal, type the following, and then hit Enter:
If node installed correctly, you should be able to type JavaScript commands and see the result:
