kairstenfay / slack-wayback

A Slack bot that fetches the most current archived versions of URLs (as available) and posts them in response to mentions. Uses the Wayback Machine API for creating URLs.

Slack Wayback bot

This code is for deploying a Slack bot that responds to app mentions with the latest web.archive.org archived copy of any links in the user's message. The code is written to run on AWS Lambda.

Requirements

To deploy this bot, you'll need access to a Slack space where you have permissions to install new apps, and you'll also need an AWS account.

Slack configuration

The Slack app has the following features and functionality:

• Event Subscriptions (registered using the provided AWS Lambda URL endpoint)
• Bots
• Permissions (This is where you'll find your bot token which you'll want to configure as an environment variable named SLACK_BOT_TOKEN. This is the token that starts with xoxb-*.)

Currently, the configured Slack Bot Token Scopes are:

• app_mentions:read
• channels:join
• chat:write
• chat:write.public
• links:read

The bot is also subscribed to the app_mention Event Name. It is not subscribed to any events on behalf of users.

Example Display Information

App name	Short description
Wayback Machine	If you @ me, I'll post the most recent archived copies of the links in your message. Use me to get around news paywalls!

Related tutorials

If you're interested in setting up a similar Slack bot, I recommend starting with the Slack API Bot tutorial.

Once you're ready to deploy, I recommend this Medium post for configuring Slack bots on AWS Lambda.