pizza-bot
Learn how to order
Welcome Pizza Botter
Howdy
Whether or not you actually want to eat Domino's "pizza", this project will show us how to take a fun idea (a Slack bot that delivers pizza), break it down into small and manageable steps, and work with real-life (sometimes messy) external libraries to make your idea become a real thing.
Before we begin, let's do a little set up.
Things You Need Before We Start
Node
You will need to have Node installed on your machine. The libraries we use require Node 4+ (the examples in this repo use the current release, Node 6). If you have an older version, check out nvm to upgrade.
Check if you have Node installed by typing node --version
in your terminal. If you get an error, download it here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/
Git
You will need to have Git installed as well. One quick way to do this is to install GitHub Desktop.
Check if you have Git installed by typing git --version
in your terminal. If you get an error, download it here: https://desktop.github.com/
GitHub Account
Sign up for a GitHub account. If you want to clone the code locally and push changes, you'll need to generate an SSH key and upload it to GitHub.
Break Into Teams
Get into teams of 2-3.
Once you are in teams, pick your team name and create a public Slack channel. Invite the workshop instructor, assistants and everyone on your team using the /invite
command.
Once you have your team channel set up, DM your team name to the instructor, and they will give you a Slack API token.
Set Up The Project
We will be pair programming during this workshop. One person on the team should fork the repo (see below). Everyone else on the team can clone that copy to their machines and follow the setup steps below.
Fork this repo
You won't be able to make changes to this example repo, so you will need to fork it (make a copy of it). Have one person click the "Fork" button in the upper right hand corner of this repo. This will give you your own copy of this example repo to work with in your Github account.
You will be using one repo for your team so add everyone on your team as a "collaborator". You can do that at https://github.com/<GHUsername>/pizza-bot/settings/collaboration
.
Clone Your Forked Version
Make a local copy of your version using the git clone
command. Use the "Clone or Download" button to get the URL to your copy of the project.
Type cd pizza-bot
to change your working directory into your copy of the repo.
Create a .env File
Create a file named .env
in the root of your project. Add this line to the file:
export SLACK_TOKEN=replace_me
If you are comfortable creating your own Slack API token, you can follow these instructions. Otherwise, ask a mentor to create one for you. Once you have a Slack API token, replace replace_me
with the token.
Once you have your token, open a terminal and type:
source .env
This will expose the variables in your .env
file to the current terminal session. You will need to
type source .env
for each new terminal window you open. If you see this error Missing configuration. Config must include either slackToken AND/OR clientId, clientSecret, and port
you forgot to type source .env
Install Depedencies
Use npm install
in the root of your project to install all the project dependencies.
Start Your Bot
This project uses npm
scripts to perform tasks. You can find them in the package.json
file.
Type npm start
in a terminal window to start your bot. Find your bot in Slack and it should have a green active icon next to it. If you don't see that, check your terminal for logs (did you remember to source .env
?).
In Slack type hello bot
and see if it responds. You can also type @<botname> help
to see what help commands it has.
Heads up: your bot will restart on every code change. This is a great feature for development, not so useful in production
First Exercise
Once you have your bot running, it's time to dig in! Take a look at the README in this branch for the first exercise: https://github.com/SparkPost/pizza-bot/tree/01-plugin