README.md

digest-slack-bot

When invited to your Slack channels, this bot identifies messages that were added a specific reaction (e.g. a balloon), and shares a weekly digest of messages with the most of those reactions.

It is used in the Mangrove Friends community for staying in the loop, and know about the week's highlights.

Setup

1. Deploy this project to heroku using the button above (this will clone the repo in a new instance, install the scheduler and mongolab add-ons, and start index.js)

2. When it's done, create the bot in your Slack account's configuration:

• go to https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot
• make sure that you selected the right Slack account, from the top-right selector
• give your bot a username (e.g. balloon)
• keep a copy of the provided token
• confirm the creation of this bot

3. Go to the settings page of your heroku instance, click on "Reveal Config Vars", then make sure that:

• the MONGODB_URI environment variable is set to your mongodb instance,
• SLACK_TOKEN contains the token you created at step 2
• and set the other required environment variables (see below)

4. Setup the scheduled job:

• go back to the "Overview" tab of your heroku instance's settings
• click on the "Heroku Scheduler" add-on
• add the following job: node job.js
• select the periodicity and time when you want to receive the digest

5. Restart the heroku instance

6. Invite the bot to the channels you want it to listen to

Required environment variables

• SLACK_TOKEN (mandatory, see setup process above)
• SLACK_NAME: name of your Slack account (default: nomedu)
• BOT_NAME: name of your bot on Slack (default: Balloon Bot)
• DIGEST_CHANNEL: name of the Slack channel in which the weekly digest will be shared
• MONGODB_URI, default: mongodb://localhost:27017/balloon-bot
• REACTION_NAME, default: balloon

Contributors

• Francesco Occhipinti
• Adrien Joly

Links for reference

• heroku's deploy url
• heroku's app.json schema
• mongoose guide
• sample messages