Building Slack Bots with Node.js

There are a number frameworks for building Slack bots such as botkit and beepboop. But sometimes you just want to use the native Slack APIs and build your bot without the added burden of a complex bot application framework. If this sounds like what you are looking for, then you have come to the right place.

This project demonstrates how to apply the essential Slack APIs using the keep it simple principle and a straight forward approach to extending and customizing your bot's conversational dialog and interactive UX (interactive buttons/menus).

Slack has an extensive set of APIs for building user-to-bot conversational UI and interactive messaging applications. This project implements a bare minimal bot application written in node that provides a template for integrating with the various Slack APIs. This is a starting point application for building your bot that can be thought of as a basic modular template and set of coding patterns for building a Slack bot that exercises the essential Slack APIs and bot interaction features.

Support for api.ai is included for demonstration purposes, but other NLP services can be used instead.

The focus of the project is to make it easier to implement NLP intents and conversational bot/user interactions and the associated UI interactions that might come about from the use of Slack attachments (such as Slack interactive message buttons and interactive message menus). Adding new NLP intents and handling the callbacks for interactive UI elements are demonstrated in this basic bot. Examples for using incoming webhooks and slash commands are also provided.

The hope is this project will make it easier to start building a Slack bot by providing a template on which you can extend your bot with new dialog/conversations and interactions. The coding patterns will hopefully make it easy to extend the conversational user interaction when building your bot.

By design, this bot uses the Slack Event API and avoids any use of the Slack RTM API.

Note, that this bot was not designed to work with Slack Enterprise Grid. Some minor modifications would be required to have it work in a cross team enterprise environment.

Slack APIs demonstrated in this bot application:

• Event API (subscribes to: "message.im" and "reaction_added").
• Sending Text/Attachment/Interactive Messages via channel reply.
• Sending Text/Attachment/Interactive Messages via Incoming Webhook.
• Handling Slash commands.
• Handling Interactive Message actions.
• Handling oauth.access to store and use bot access token.

In addition to the core Slack REST APIs, this app demonstrates how to use the following slack wrapper APIs:

• @slack/client
• @slack/events-api
• @slack/interactive-messages
• @aoberoi/passport-slack

Give the GitHub project a spin. Hopefully you will find it a good starting point for building Node native Slack bots.