Current Status: Will respond to messages with "Yes, Slackbot."

Unity

An AWS SlackBot with the following goals in mind:

• Low cost to run, ideally no need for persistent running resources
• Easily extensible by others - it should be possible for other developers to add new functionality
• Access control - some features may need to be restricted to a subset of users.
• Friendly and helpful to interact with:
  • Responses and interactions should never be rude towards users who are unfamiliar with the project or existence of the bot
  • Format for humans not robots (prefer formatted tables, over raw JSON dumps for example)
  • Help text should be included where possible to allow discovery of features
  • Avoid over technical jargon. Clear and accurate is desirable, a technically correct but not understandable message has missed the mark.

Technologies

• AWS Lambda
• AWS API Gateway
• Slack

Prerequisites

• AWS Account
• Serverless
• AWS CLI

Setup

1. Login to https://api.slack.com/apps and Create New App

• The App name you use will be what users need to mention to communicate with Unity bot i.e @unity
• We are using the Events api so you will need to enable events
• The App will need to be installed for you to get an OAuth token.

2. After creating the application in Slack we need to set tokens for the App to use:

• These are region specific if you haven't set AWS_PROFILE you may want to use the flag for setting the region --region ap-southeast-2

  # The verification token
  # can be found under Basic Information in the App on https://api.slack.com/apps
  # This gives us the ability to check the messages sent to the App are actually coming from Slack
  aws ssm put-parameter --name unityBotVerificationToken --type String --value SecretToken

  # The OAuth token
  # can be found under OAuth & Permissions in the App on https://api.slack.com/apps
  # This gives the App the ability to send messages to Slack
  aws ssm put-parameter --name unityBotOAuthAccessToken --type String --value xoxb-SecretToken

3. After this is all set you will need to deploy the application

  make
  sls deploy

4. The output of deployment will have an endpoint, you need to set this on the App on https://api.slack.com/apps under Event Subscriptions Request URL.

5. After this you should subscribe the App to Bot Events (Still under Event Subscriptions)

• I suggest for this you use:
  • app_mention - Subscribe to only the message events that mention your app or bot
  • message.app_home - A user sent a message to your Slack app
  • message.im - A message was posted in a direct message channel