Ask HN: Open-source general-purpose Slack bot template? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Open-source general-purpose Slack bot template?

6 pointsNezteb2 comments

Discord and Twitch have pretty active bot communities when it comes to general-purpose and configurable bots:

Discord:

- https://yagpdb.xyz/

- https://carl.gg/

- https://dyno.gg/

- https://mee6.xyz/

Twitch:

- https://nightbot.tv/

- https://moo.bot/

(Most of these aren’t open-source, but they are good examples of configurable/customizable bots, and there are dozens of decent templates on GitHub as well)

Does anyone know of similar projects meant to be used with Slack? If not I'll be building my own, but I wanted to see if anyone here knew of something that I hadn't found yet.

In an ideal world it'd be a repo anyone can clone, swap out some workspace-specific IDs and tokens, deploy to your own Slack workspace, and come with a few basic test commands.

Not a helpful answer but I’ve written a few Slack bots for internal teams. I can’t easily share the code of my Slack bots, but the Slack developer documentation is really good.

https://api.slack.com/

There is also tons of example code on GitHub, of highly-variable quality. But that’s okay, getting started with something is better than not starting at all.

I started off using Python but has since ported stuff to Node.js (with help from Axios) because it allowed me to glue internal systems together more quickly.

I do not know your dev experience level, but he only real hurdle I had was learning how to format Slack responses how you want.

My recommendation is that you identify a test Slack instance and a test channel and start from the beginning: connect to that Slack and post a test message to your test channel. Then, iterate from there.

Yeah I’m planning to work on a PoC using Bolt: https://github.com/slackapi/bolt-js

I’m confident I can get something working reasonably quickly. I was hoping to get some Slack boilerplate out of the way, but I’m sure it’s not too obnoxious.

Also since posting I did find a generic chat bot framework that works with Slack and a few other chat systems: https://github.com/Yoctol/bottender

Even so I may give in and write it all from scratch to avoid excess dependencies.

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