A chat bot for Slack based on llimllib/slask.

• Based on slack Real Time Messaging API
• Simple plugins mechanism
• Messages can be handled concurrently
• Automatically reconnect to slack when connection is lost

sudo pip install slackbot

First you need to get the slack api token for your bot. You have two options:

1. If you use a bot user integration of slack, you can get the api token on the integration page.
2. If you use a real slack user, you can generate an api token on slack web api page.

This uses a configuration file and looks for a section called slackbot. Both the config file and its spec are specified using Panoptez-specific names:

• PZBOT_CONFIG
• PZBOT_CONFIG_SPEC

If these don't exist, the bot fails startup.

The available keys include:

• debug (default: False)
• api_token (default: '')
• plugins (default: ['slackbot.plugins'])

Here's an example:

[slackbot]
debug = False
api_token = ''
plugins = ['slackbot.plugins',]

Note the trailing comma, to force the ConfigObj to parse as a list.

Under slackbot, a [[handlers]] subsection can be added that specifies how to handle bot messages. The format is bot_id = handler module.

from slackbot.bot import Bot
def main():
    bot = Bot()
    bot.run()
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Now you can talk to your bot in your slack client!

A chat bot is meaningless unless you can extend/customize it to fit your own use cases.

To write a new plugin, simplely create a function decorated by slackbot.bot.respond_to or slackbot.bot.listen_to:

• A function decorated with respond_to is called when a message matching the pattern is sent to the bot (direct message or @botname in a channel/group chat)
• A function decorated with listen_to is called when a message matching the pattern is sent on a channel/group chat (not directly sent to the bot)

from slackbot.bot import respond_to
from slackbot.bot import listen_to

@respond_to('I love you')
def love(message):
    message.reply('I love you too!')

@listen_to('Can someone help me?')
def help(message):
    # Message is replied to the sender (prefixed with @user)
    message.reply('Yes, I can!')

    # Message is sent on the channel
    # message.send('I can help everybody!')

To extract params from the message, you can use regular expression:

from slackbot.bot import respond_to

@respond_to('Give me (.*)')
def giveme(message, something):
    message.reply('Here is %s' % something)

And add the plugins module to PLUGINS list of slackbot settings, e.g. slackbot_settings.py:

PLUGINS = [
    'slackbot.plugins',
    'mybot.plugins',
]