README

submit-this is a simple slack bot that can take a slack message, and construct a link (to a website of your choice) with query parameters derived from your message, and send you a slack message including the link. Designed to be useful for prefilling forms.

So, you could send the bot a message

@submitthis here is the data for submission

and the text "here is the data for submission" would be sent to the form. Alternatively the message

@submitthis http://an.intersting.website.com

would result in the opengraph data from the website (title, description, image) being sent to the form

Setup

Pre-requisites

To run this bot you will need a server which is publicly addressable, since slack needs to tell the bot when messages arrive. This is easy to work aroung for development scenarios using for instance services like ngrok.

Secondly, you'll need to make what slack calls 'an app' despite the name it doesn't involve coding. You'll just give your bot a name and some permissions to do things in the slack workspace you want to target. The overview of this process is

Create an 'app'
add 'Bots' under features and functionality
Install the app into your slack workspace
under features and functionality, got to permissions and add under 'Bot Token Scopes' these scopes 'app_mentions:read', 'channels:read', 'chat:write', 'groups:read'
again under features and functionality, go to 'event subscriptions' and under 'Subscribe to bot events' these events 'app_mentions' and 'member_joined_channel'
now re-install the app in your workspace, because adding the event subscriptions changed the permissions.

The best guide I can find for this is Developing Slack apps locally, most of which also applies to a production environment.

Install

Clone this repo

In your repo's directory, run yarn or npm install according to your preference.

Take a copy of .env.example called .env

Configure Slack

For development use, in the file .env customise the two slack environment variables with values for your app and workspace at api.slack.com. You will need the slack signing secret from 'basic information' and the 'Bot User OAuth Access Token' from the 'OAuth and permissions' page. In development (NODE_ENV=development or not defined) the app will read the variables from this file.

For production (NODE_ENV=production) you will need to set these environment variables yourself. E.g. heroku lets you define these variable via your dashboard.

Configure the bot

Configure more environment variables (differently in development and production as above)

PORT - the port your server will run on
SUBMIT_MESSAGE_TEMPLATE - to customise the complete message created by the bot.
SUBMIT_LINK_TEMPLATE - to customise the link created by the bot.

The message template in .env.example is a full example of how this could be used with airtable.com, using opengraph data obtained from a link in the message you send to the bot.

You may find this formatting guide useful ... most importantly, it shows how to craft a message with a url linked from alternative text, since this bot will likely be creating long links.

Start

Shell script: bin/bot
Node: node index or nodemon index

Design Decisions

Do not use RTM api it appears to be deprecated and use events api to capture messages instead.

Use 12 Factor principles. Application to node: The practical JS 12 factor application

Dependencies

ngrok

(useful for development)

Free service. Can install via homebrew. See this gist for help.

Getting started with ngrok

Reference

node-slack-sdk

baob / submit-this