Relax is a Message Broker for Slack Bots. What does that mean? If you are running a "bot-as-a-service" for Slack, you have to maintain hundreds (if not thousands) of websocket connections and handle the deluge of events from all these connections.
Relax does all that heavy lifting for you and provides you with a single stream of events that your web app can then take action on. The protocol is JSON based and so any web app can communicate with Relax.
If you are a Rails app however, there is a nifty Ruby client for you to use.
You can also download pre-built binaries here.
If you are a Heroku user, you can deploy Relax right away with one click.
Known Issue: When deploying using the "Deploy with Heroku" button,
Heroku's Free Redis server takes a while to boot up, so your Relax
deployment will take a while to come up as well. You can see Relax
trying to connect to Heroku's Redis server by tailing logs heroku logs --tail -a <your-heroku-app-name>. After a while, it should connect.
- Pluggable Messaging Backends
- Analytics
- Don't want to host it yourself? Get in touch at hello@zerobotlabs.com
Although Relax is written in Go, it does not require any knowledge of Go. You can download the latest stable version of relax here.
Binaries are available for both OS X and Linux. Untar and gunzip the
downloaded file and move the relax binary to your $PATH to start
using.
Relax is used in production to power Nestor.
To run it, basically run relax (assuming it is in your $PATH).
RELAX_BOTS_KEY=relax_bots_key RELAX_BOTS_PUBSUB=relax_bots_pubsub RELAX_EVENTS_QUEUE=relax_events_queue REDIS_HOST=localhost:6379 relax
The Relax message broker requires a few environment variables to be set up (these same environment variables are also used to set up the Relax Ruby Client). These environment variables are basically Redis keys that can be configured based on your specific needs.
RELAX_BOTS_KEY: This can be any string value and is used to store state about all Slack clients currently controlled by Relax in Redis.
RELAX_BOTS_PUBSUB: This can be any string value and is used by Relax clients to notify Relax brokers that a new Slack bot has been started.
RELAX_EVENTS_QUEUE: This can be any string value and is used by Relax brokers to send events to the client.
RELAX_MUTEX_KEY: This can be any string value and is used by Relax brokers to decide whether to send events back to clients.
You interact with Relax by sending messages to Relax via Redis, there are two primary ways of interacting with Relax:
To start a bot, you need to HSET on REDIS_BOTS_KEY with a JSON blob
containing "team_id" and "token" keys which represent the Team UID
and Token for the bot you want to start. Along with this, you should
also PUBLISH on REDIS_BOTS_PUBSUB with a JSON blob containing the
keys "type" and "team_id" containing the values "team_added" and
the Team UID of the bot you want to start.
For e.g., for a bot who's Slack Team UID is "TDEADBEEF" and who's token
is "xoxo_slackbotoken", you can issue the following commands using
redis-cli to start a bot (assuming that $REDIS_BOTS_KEY is redis_bots_key):
$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> MULTI
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> HSET redis_bots_key TDEADBEEF '{"team_id":"TDEADBEEF","token":"xoxo_slackbotoken"}'
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> HGETALL redis_bots_key
1) "TDEADBEEF"
2) "{\"team_id\":\"TDEADBEEF\",\"token\":\"xoxo_slackbotoken\"}"
127.0.0.1:6379> PUBLISH redis_bots_pubsub '{"type":"team_added","team_id":"TDEADBEEF"}'
QUEUED
127.0.0.1:6379> EXECRelax also generates events (details of events are described in the "Events" section of the README)
Events are queued in the $REDIS_EVENTS_QUEUE key in Redis and so to consume events,
you need to LPOP or BLPOP the $REDIS_EVENTS_QUEUE to deal with events.
Slack Events are gathered from all teams that Slack is listening to and are multiplexed onto a single Redis queue. The event data structure consists of the following fields:
This is a string value contains the type of event can hold the following values:
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
disable_bot |
This event is sent when authentication with a team fails (either due to a wrong token or an expired token). message_new |
message_changed |
This event is sent when a message has been edited. |
message_deleted |
This event is sent when a message has been deleted. |
reaction_added |
This event is sent when a reaction has been added to a message. |
reaction_removed |
This event is sent when a reaction has been removed from a message. |
team_join |
This event is sent when a new member has been added to the team. The best practice upon receiving this event is to refresh the team database and make sure that information on all members of the team is up to date. |
im_created |
This event is sent when a new direct message has been opened with the bot. This can be ignored in most cases as it is used by Relax to keep internal metadata in sync. |
This is a string value and is the UID (generated by Slack) of the user associated with the
event. So in the case of message_new it's the UID of the user who
created the message, for reaction_added, it's the UID of the user who added a reaction to a message.
This is the UID (generated by Slack) of the channel associated with the event.
This is a boolean value to indicate whether the channel (with the UID
channel_uid) is an IM or not.
This is a string value and contains the text associated with the event. This can mean different things in different contexts:
| Type | What "text" field means |
|---|---|
message_new |
The message text |
message_changed |
The new text of the message |
message_deleted |
The original message text |
reaction_added |
Reaction added to a message. This contains the text representation of a reaction, for e.g. :simple_smiley: |
reaction_removed |
Reaction removed from a message. This contain the text representation of a reaction, for e.g. :simple_smiley: |
team_join |
Since there is no text metadata associated with this event, it is always blank. |
im_created |
Since there is no text metadata associated with this event, it is always blank. |
This is a string value and represent the UID of the bot that Relax controls. This is useful if you want to strip out the @-mention word in a message @-mention'ed to the bot.
This is a string value and represents the timestamp at which a particular event occurred but can have different meanings in different contexts:
| Type | What "timestamp" field means |
|---|---|
disable_bot |
Empty string |
message_new |
Timestamp at which the message was created. In this case, timestamp and event_timestamp will be the same |
message_changed |
Timestamp of the message that has been changed. Upon receiving a "message_changed" event, you can use "channel_uid" and "timestamp" to identify the message who's text has been changed and modify its text accordingly |
message_deleted |
Timestamp of the message that has been deleted. Upon receiving a "message_changed" event, you can use "channel_uid" and "timestamp" to identify the message that has been deleted and delete that message accordingly |
reaction_added |
Timestamp of the message for which a reaction has been added. Upon receiving a "reaction_added" event, you can use "channel_uid" and "timestamp" to identify the message for which a reaction has been added and change the metadata for that message accordingly |
reaction_removed |
Timestamp of the message for which a reaction has been removed. Upon receiving a "reaction_removed" event, you can use "channel_uid" and "timestamp" to identify the message for which a reaction has been removed and change the metadata for that message accordingly |
team_join |
Empty string |
im_created |
Empty string |
This is a string value and until Relax supports multiple providers, this is always "slack".
This is a string value and represents the time at which an event occurs.
In the case of disable_bot, team_join and im_created events, it is
an empty string.