This is a package for running a Bot on Slack as a Flask app. It is not a fully built codebase as it is currently in use in a highly personalized way. In future updates, the functionality will shift to being more of a production deployment.

For now this code is just a starter framework to build a Slack bot with, for which you can customize functionality and easily add new modules.

The event handling modules create a framework for processing all events in threads, pulled from an event queue. This is necessary as the Slack API will duplicate any requests if it does not hear back within 3 seconds, and many events may require longer processsing time, thus it can be bypassed by passing all payloads to the event handler, allowing the bot to immediately respond HTTP 200 OK.

Some additional modules include models for Slack events and replies. These are wrapper objects that extend some extra functionality. In the case of replies, we can pass in a string or a string returning function to get a reply unique to the user. There is a chat features module containing a reaction based poll implementation, and more useful chat interactions in the future.

In order to have the bot run successfully on in a Slack workspace, you'll need to get access tokens from registering your bot on the Slack API site (by clicking Create New App).

Once you have your Bot User OAuth Access Token (found in the OAuth & Permissions tab), Client Secret, and Signing Secret, be sure to add the required scopes from the OAuth & Permissions tab. The following scopes are needed for this app:

channels:history
chat:write
reactions:read
users.profile:read
users:read
users:read.email

Next download this respository and open the .env file in a text editor where you will want to paste your access token, client secret, and signing secret into the .env file (without quotes):

SLACK_TOKEN='your slack workspace token'
SLACK_SS='your slack workspace signing secret'
SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET='your slack client secret'

There are two more variables set aside for if you wish to work in a development worksapce for testing:

SLACK_DEV_TOKEN=
SLACK_DEV_SS=

You just need to register your app again on a new workspace.

Once the environment variables are set, go download ngrok to run a URL tunnel to your local host domain. This allows for Slack workspace events to be received by your app.

Once it is downloaded, run ngrok.exe and enter:

ngrok http 5000

This will open a URL that forwards to your local host. You can either copy the URL from the interface or open a webrower and go to:

localhost:4040

From there copy the tunnel URL. This tab allows lets you see the live traffic of the URL which is useful for debugging.

Next we need to register the URL with the Slack client so it forwards events to our local host. Go to the specific page for your app from the Slack API site. Click on the Event Subscriptions tab, click Enable Events, and paste your URL into the Request URL box adding "/slack/events" to the end.

On the same page click the Subscribe to bot events button then click Add Bot User Event and add both the message.channels and reaction_added events.

Finally, run the bot.py file and make sure your Request URL is showing as verified.

Nothing much will happen when events come in as it is personalizable (until abstracted in the future), but you can initiate this by editting the (custom_reply.py)[./internal_utils/custom_reply] classes: get_personal_message_reply() and get_personal_reaction_reply(), and adding to the dictionary what responses you wish the bot to have for which users (denoted by display_name).