dialogflow-slack-sdk

Introduction

The goal of this guide is to show you how to set up an integration deployment to link your Dialogflow agent to slack. If you don't already have a Dialogflow agent, you may create one or add a prebuilt agent.
Although this integration deployment may be set up on any other hosting platform, these instructions will use Google's App Engine/Cloud functions.

Using the dialogflowcx integration-What to expect

Through this sdk you should be able to integrate dialogflowcx agent with slack bot. You can do the following:

Interact with an agent via Events or SocketMode on slack.
Interact with an agent on the on bot home page.
For the use cases that requires posting on channel so as other members get visiblity on the message. Interact with agent on channel by mentioning the bot name with @(bot-name). See here for the demo on channel.
On channel, the bot will reply to bot mentions requests on the same thread.
The conversation can be continued from channel to DM (bot Home).
Display custom payloads from dialogflowcx via slack's block kit.
Interact with block elements (like buttons) for interacting with agent.
Update the block element with the response from dialogflow agent.
This sdk can be set up in any hosting platform, the README provides instructions for Google App Engine and Cloud Functions.

GCP Setup

Log in or Sign up for GCP

Log in or sign up to google cloud console using a credit or debit card for a free trial. Create a project and enable billing for that project.
For deploying with App Engine, go to App Engine and enable the API. See here for more details.
For deploying with Cloud Functions, see the Cloud Functions README.

gcloud CLI setup

The deployment process for GCP App Engine via this README utilizes gcloud CLI commands. Follow the steps below to set up gcloud CLI locally for this deployment.

On the gcloud CLI documentation page, select your OS and follow the instructions for the installation.
Run gcloud config get-value project to check the GCP Project configured.

Service Account Setup (GCP)

For the integration to function properly, it is necessary to create a Service Account in your agent’s GCP Project. See this page of the documentation for more details.

For the service account, fill in the details, and give it the "Dialogflow Client API" role.
Download the resulting JSON key file.
Save the JSON key file as dialogflowcx.json inside the functions/config directory of the cloned repo(not recommended for production), else set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env variable on the deployment environment to the absolute path of Service Account JSON key file. See this guide for details. If JSON key is saved inside the repo, then uncomment CREDENTIALS_PATH in this file.

Creating a Slack app

Create a bot in a new Slack Workspace

Create or Sign in to Slack
Create a Slack app
Adding Bot scopes in OAuth & Permissions tab
Add app_mentions:read, chat:write, im:history, im:read, im:write
Enable event subscription
Go to the event subscriptions and enable events app_mention, message.im.
The event subscription will ensure slack sends the events when they occur to the link provided.
The url to be entered is your app's url. Slack authorizes the link we provide, by sending a request with a challenge parameter and the app must respond with the challenge parameter.
Go to interactivity and shortcuts and enable interactivity. The url to be entered is your app's url.

Setup Slack

The integration requires slack credentials from the slack api to function properly.

Follow the steps to obtain the credentials and setup the /functions/config/token.go file to deploy and start the integration:

In the Slack API, go to the basic information for your app and install the app to your workspace.
On installing the app to the workspace, you should be able to see a token in OAuth & Permissions. This is your BOT_TOKEN.
In Basic Information section for the app, create an APP_TOKEN under the App-Level Tokens.
In Basic Information section for the app, click on Show for Signing Secret. Copy and replace all token the values above in config/token.go file.
On slack, go to the channel(s) you want the slack bot to have access to and invite the bot to the channel. Alternatively, you can type /invite on the channel

There are two modes in slack to obtain information about events occurring in slack.

Through Event subscription via The Events Api
Through socket mode To switch to socket mode, go to socket mode tab on slack api and turn on socket mode.
Follow the App Engine set up below and then refer README

Deploying via App Engine

Setup

Go into the project's settings and click on the Project ID link to open its associated GCP Project.
Click on the navigation menu in the GCP console and click "Billing". Set up and enable billing for the project.
Enable Google App Engine for the project here.
Clone this git repository onto your local machine or development environment: git clone [repository url]
Open the root directory of the repository on your local machine or development environment.

Changes in the app.yaml file

Open the app.yaml in the root directory of the repository, and uncomment the last line when using socket mode

If you have not done so already, copy (or export) your Service Account JSON key file to the desired subdirectory.

Changes in token.go file

Open the token.go file and add all slack tokens as mentioned in the slack set up above. Also add the project id of your GCP project as well as the agent name in dialogflow.

Deploying App Engine

On the terminal, cd to the root directory of the cloned project and gcloud app deploy --project [project-id] This will deploy your project.
To check the logs, gcloud app --project [project-id] logs tail -s default
Plugin the url obtained from 1 into slack's event url. Request URL should get approved if the app was able to successfully respond back with the challenge parameter. This basically meant slack sent your URL some request, and you needed to respond with the challenge parameter, which you did!
Plugin the url into the request url in interactivity and shortcuts tab in slack api.
On slack, Ensure the bot events you need to subscribe to, are all selected. If not, then add and save them. Include app_mention and message.im

Post-deployment

Shutting Down an Integration

In order to shut down an integration set up via the steps in this README, you need to delete the entire project where app engine is hosted.

Deploying via cloud Functions

For deploying via Cloud Functions see this README

masudak / dialogflow-slack-sdk