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HackNightBot

A Slack bot for Chi Hack Night.

Current functions

@hacknightbot hangs out in the #chihacknight channel and chimes in under one of the following conditions

  • anyone types app me - responds with a randomized silly app idea in the form of "An app for {verb} the {noun_phrase} of the {agency} & the {org}" - by @evz
  • anyone types data project - responds with a randomized silly data project idea in the form of "You could use {dataset_name} ({dataset_link}) to get a better understanding of {service}" - by @evz
  • anyone types some form of 'hey guys' - suggests a random gender neutral alternative to address a group - by @cathydeng
  • coming soon welcome messages to new users - by @hunterowens, @derekeder

Add your own @hacknightbot responses by editing app.py!

Run it locally

You need to get an Auth token for the team that you're wanting to post the amazing ideas into.

To get an auth token

  1. Go here: https://api.slack.com/web, scroll down to the bottom and find the list of teams that you belong to.
  2. Click the button to issue a token for the team that you want to put your bot in and grab the token.

Run the app

This app was developed using Python 3.4.3 but I'm pretty sure it'll work in Python 2.7.x as well. Either way, get yourself a virtual enviromnent and install the requirements:

# Using vanilla virtualenv 
$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

# Using virtualenvwrapper
$ mkvirtualenv bot
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

In order for the app to run, it needs the auth token that you just got set as an environmental variable. So, before you can run it, you'll need to set it:

$ export SLACK_AUTH_TOKEN='theauthtoken'

To make those stick around between terminal sessions, you can add that line into your .bashrc file (or similar) and source it:

$ vim ~/.bashrc # add those to export statements
$ source ~/.bashrc

Now that all that is setup, you can run the app by doing python app.py with your virtualenv activated.

Modifying data sources

In the script called getMaterials.py there are a few functions that generate all of the various bits and pieces that the app uses to fill in the MadLibs that are used to create the messages. Those functions generate the JSON files that are in json_data and which the app reads to do it's magic. If you want to modify what the bot is saying, you can either modify the functions that generate the JSON files or just modify the JSON files directly.