🤖 devICT bot 🤖

A slack bot powered by Slack webhook events.

Overview

This is not using any of the Slack platform stuff. Trying to keep it simple by simply receiving webhook events from Slack and responding to those events however we want.

• Runs as an API service listening on a /slack/event endpoint for webhook events from Slack.
  • Deployed to Deno Deploy
• Commands are implemented as handlers that are executed if the message from the event matches some defined criteria.
  • Check the commands/ping.ts for a basic example.
• Responses to the events are sent as separate HTTP requests, not as responses to the incoming webhooks.
  • We're using the @slack/web-api package, which is a thin wrapper over Slack's HTTP API.

Contributing

This is a great project to contribute to as a member of the devICT community!

Local dev

This project runs on TypeScript with Deno.

Setup

• Install deno with brew install deno, or several other methods
• Copy .env.example to .env
• Plug your SLACK_TOKEN in to .env (reach out to @seth for this)
• Run deno task cache to download dependencies

Running the service

• deno task start

Testing commands locally

There is a separate Slack app for development (@bot (test)) that can be used. Reach out to @seth in Slack for the SLACK_TOKEN.

Simulate events from Slack hitting your local server with the bin/simulate-message util.

$ bin/simulate-message.ts "@bot ping"

or for windows

deno run --env --allow-env --allow-net .\bin\simulate-message.ts "@bot ping"

You won't see the simulated message in Slack, but the response will show up there from @bot (test).

Testing reply in thread responses

To test reply in thread responses, you can pass a thread_ts to the simulate-message.ts command.

$ bin/simulate-message.ts "@bot events" "1724586898.242849"

To get the thread_ts for your message:

• Post a message of your own in the #bot-testing channel
• Post another message as a threaded reply to the first one
• Copy the link to the threaded reply message
• Grab the thread_ts query param from the URL

Slack App

This bot is installed in the devICT work space as a Slack app called bot.

• The OAuth & Permissions page contains the SLACK_TOKEN needed to power the bot.
  • The following scopes must be added: app_mentions:read, chat:write
• The event receiving endpoint must be added on the Event Subscriptions page.
  • Events to subscribe to: app_mention

Slack Events

A list of all the events can be seen here.

The events the bot responds to are defined in the events.ts module. Typebox schemas are defined for the events we respond to.

Note: If we want to respond to new event types, we will need to add them in the Slack app console before Slack will start sending them.

Deployment

Bot is deployed on Deno Deploy. The Slack App points to the /slack/event endpoint of the deployed bot API (this repo).