SlackLib Bot Starter Kit

A template for getting starting with creating Slack Bots using TypeScript and Slacklib

Getting Started

> git clone https://github.com/1000team/bot-starter mybot
> cd mybot
> yarn
> SLACK_TOKEN=your_slackbot_token_here yarn start

Prerequisities

• You will need to head to Custom Integrations --> Bots in your Slack.
  • The URL will look like: https://YOUR_SLACK.slack.com/apps/manage/custom-integrations
• Choose "Add Configuration"
• Choose a Username
  • This is how you will invoke your bot on Slack
• Copy your API Token
  • This will be your SLACK_TOKEN mentioned below

How to use Slacklib

Setting up

First we can to use the setup function to declare our default configuration.
This returns and object with 3 functions:

• getConfig: Synchronously returns the current configuration
• setConfig: Asynchonously updates the configuration and persists it. Returns a promise.
• register: Synchronously used to register new bot commands

// config.ts
import { setup } from 'slacklib'
export { getConfig, setConfig, register }

interface Config {
  hello: string
}

const defaults: Config = {
  hello: 'world'
}

const { getConfig, setConfig, register } = setup(defaults)

Registering a command

After we've called and exported the functions from setup, we can now use register to create commands.
register takes three parameters:

• command: string Name of the command
• description: string Description of the command (appears in the help response)
• callback: Callback The function that is called when the command is used

The callback is called with 4 parameters:

• bot: SlackClient The instance of the SlackClient for communicating with Slack
• msg: Chat.Message The full message object from Slack
• cfg: Config & BaseConfiguration (object): Your configuration and the base configuration (name, channel, emoji, and timezone)
• args: string[] The arguments after the command. E.g. @bot hello world will pass in args: ['world']

// hello.ts
import { register } from './config'

register('hello', 'Will respond with the hello value from config', (bot, msg, cfg, _args) => {
  bot.postMessage({
    channel: msg.channel, // Required. We'll respond to the channel
    text: `Hello ${cfg.hello}!` // We declare hello in our config.ts
  })
})

Starting the Bot

The slacklib library exports a start function with automatic retries (3 seconds between attempts).
It will throw an exception if you have not yet called setup.

// index.ts
import './config' // Just call our config/setup module for its side effects
import { start } from 'slacklib'
import './hello' // Load our hello command

start()

After compiling with yarn build you will be able to start your bot.

> yarn build
> SLACK_TOKEN=xoxb-aaaaaaaaaaaaa-bbbbb yarn start

Your SLACK_TOKEN will be persisted, so the next time you start your bot you can simply use yarn start.
Your configuration will exist in ./database relative to your project folder.

Using the Bot

You will need to invite your bot to a channel in Slack:

> /invite @mybot

Then invoke it:

> @mybot help
> @mybot hello