JournalBot: Your daily dose of encouragement
JournalBot is a Slack bot that monitors a channel and encourages users to post a daily update. The bot may remind users about posting an update if they forget.
Changelog
- 211027 v0.03 Moved to logging interface to reduce chatter/noise
- 211027 v0.02 Fixed some bugs and implemented (cron'able) actions
- 211026 v0.01 Initial version, as daemon
Development and installation
# Create a new virtual environment for development
$ virtualenv JournalBot
$ source JournalBot/bin/activate
# Install necessary packages
$ pip3 install slack-sdk
# Adjust configuration file
$ cp config.ini.example config.ini
$ vim config.ini
# Run the bot
$ python3 JournalBot.py
# After testing, you can fire and forget
$ nohup python3 JournalBot.py -d >> bot.log &
# You can invoke JournalBot through cron
$ python3 JournalBot.py --reminder
$ python3 JournalBot.py --warning
The configuration file is simple and straight forward, check out config.ini.example for an example.
Slack integration
Create a new slack application from scratch for your workspace on the Slack API page and assign basic parameters such as "JournalBot" in Basic Information.
Navigate to OAuth & Permissions. If your journal channel is public, you need the following scopes: channels.history, channels.read, chat.write (adjust accordingly for private channels).
You should now be good to go. You may need event subscriptions for message.channels
depending on the setup.
How to contribute and attribute
This bot is a hack to motivate students to post their daily updates in a channel, similar to scrum updates. Feel free to fork, clone, modify at your will. If you want to contribute, reach out to the main author Mathias Payer first. I'm always happy about a shout out though.