A simple Slack bot using NodeJS

Here's a simple Slack bot using NodeJS and the slack-client node package. The repository is packaged to work on local & distant environments (on your server or Heroku for example).

Features

The bot is capable of handling some commands by default :

• !ask: Magic 8 Ball (see Wikipedia)
• !poll add My question: Add a poll on the current channel with "My question" as the question
• !random: Pick a random number between 1 and 10
• !random x: Pick a random number between 1 and x
• !surprise: Well, it's not a suprise if I tell you, right?
• !cat: Display a cat GIF from thecatapi.com

You can easily add a command by forking the project and edit the slack-bot.js file.

Configuration

You need to have a Slack token to connect the bot to your Slack. You can create one there :

• https://yourteamname.slack.com/apps/manage/custom-integrations

You'll be able to customize the username, avatar, and profile informations of your bot. More importantly you'll be able to see your API token. It looks like that : xoxb-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Open slack-bot.js. Look at the top of the file for var token = 'YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN' and replace YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN by your token (you need the keep the single quotes around the token).

You can also define other constants :

• var auto_reconnect = true: set to false to disable auto-reconnect on Slack errors
• var auto_mark_as_read = true: set to false to disable auto-mark-as-read message after it is processed

Usage

Clone the repository, edit the configuration variables and run :

node slack-bot.js

It should output :

Connected to Slack. You are YOUR_BOT_NAME on YOUR_TEAM_SLACK_NAME

If you point your browser to http://localhost:8080, it should output Your Slack bot is up and running.

You can use forever to run and manage the Slack bot.