Stanley

A secret Santa Slack bot for positive feedback.

Setting up the bot

Just click the button, duh!

You must configure on Heroku Scheduler how often Stanley will ask for feedback. Our team is asking feedback on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It doesn't mean that all team members will be asked three times a week. Instead, Stanley will choose a sender and a receiver each day randomly.

Setting up Slack

https://api.slack.com/ -> 'Start Building'

1. Add Bot

In the section 'Add features and functionality' select Bots and fill the form

2. Permissions

In the section 'Add features and functionality' select Permissions

In the Scope add

• bot
• chat:write:bot
• team:read

3. Event Subscriptions

In the section 'Add features and functionality' select Event Subscriptions

you have to set the deployed app url into 'Requests URL' and verify

Next 'Subscribe to Bot Events' add 'message.im'

Now go to your app and have fun!

4. Install your app to your workspace

Until this moment you have a bot configure but not installed in your workspace yet. To do it and have access to Slack API credentials, click on Install your app to your workspace.

5. Set environment variables on Stanley

• SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN: Still on Slack, click on Basic Information and in the section App Credentials copy Verification Token.

• SLACK_API_TOKEN: in the section Install App, copy it from Bot User OAuth Access Token.

The variables SLACK_API_TOKEN and SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN are required. Other environment variables that are optional:

• FEEDBACK_MEMBERS: Stanley will use all members if you don't fill it in. You can get the users and their ids using Request team members command

• REDIS_URL: default is redis://127.0.0.1:6379/0

• SENTRY_DSN: for Sentry integration purposes

Helpful management commands

Request team members

To be able to see team members internal usernames (used in FEEDBACK_MEMBERS variable), you can run

FLASK_APP=stanley/app.py flask team-command

It will give you the list of Slack team members with their IDs.

Request a feedback

To ask for a feedback, just run

FLASK_APP=stanley/app.py flask request-feedback-command

This will ask a random person to provide a feedback to another random person.

Example of our command (that will run on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays):

if [ "$(date +%u)" = 1 ] || [ "$(date +%u)" = 3 ] || [ "$(date +%u)" = 5 ];
then FLASK_APP=stanley/app.py flask request-feedback-command;
fi