StackExchange-watcher

Watch the sites of the stackexchange network and get a slack notification for new questions

Why?

Because if you are like me, you like to contribute to StackExchanges sites which don't have a lot of traffic. And you don't want to check the new question page every ten minutes.

So you can simply run this code on your local machine or in a cloud function and get a nice Slack notification with the link to the questions you didn't already see.

How?

Configuration

The file config.json contains all the keys you need to run the application:

slack.webhookurl Always keep it private The URL generated by slack to reach your team. See their doc. here
slack.channel The channel which should get the notification of the new question. You can specify either a #channel or a @user
slack.username The screenname of the bot when it sends you a notification
persitence.idfilepath The path to the file where the application will write the ID of the last seen question
stackexchange.sites A JSON array of the sites you want to follow
stackexchange.refresh The refresh rate of the app in seconds

Running the app

First clone this repo, then use npm to install the dependencies:

npm install

You're ready to go, simply start the app with:

npm start

What's under the hood?

axios for the web request
cheerio for the HTML parsing
node-slack for the notification to slack

Roadmap

Use the StackExchange API to get the new questions instead of parsing the HTML
Watch the review queues
Support several slack users to have one instance for several users in the same slack team
Get rid of the id file to prepare the deployment as cloud function
Make deployable in cloud function out of the box

statox / stackexchange-watcher