Slack Bots With Hedwig

Self Promotion

• Erik DeBill• @edebill and @parsenome on twitter• https://github.com/edebill

Spredfast Pays Me

• https://www.spredfast.com/• We’ve got lots of really interesting

problems and a truly polyglot architecture

Hedwig Slack• Plugin for hedwig-im• You need to use the

github/master version instead of published hex.pm

• Maintainer answers questions in #hedwig channel on Elixir slack

• Documentation is fairly good for the basics

• See Elixir Sips episodes

Bootstrapping• follow steps on

Hedwig_slack README

• mix new myapp —sup

• cd myapp

• add hedwig_slack to deps

• mix deps.get

• mix deps.compile

Robot Generator

• Works about like you’d expect

• Prompts you to add a worker to your supervision tree. If you didn’t add the —sup option when you ran mix new this will be hard to figure out

Config.exs• Last of the boilerplate• Follow README on how to

add to config.exs

• I recommend 2 tokens - one dev, one test (rate limits will eat you)

• Responders are where the interesting stuff live

Getting a Token

Responders

• modules that use Hedwig.Responder

• ‘hear’ and ‘respond’ macros

• chime in vs answer question

• can regex capture

At this point, we’ve covered all the basics

from the docs

after_connect

• Called after connection established

• Use to register bot so outside code can find it

Sending Without Responders

• Figure out pid for your bot

• Figure out channel id (IO.inspect inside a responder works great - these remain stable forever)

• Format a Hedwig.Message with room, text, and type

Suggestions• “hear” responders will respond to ANYTHING that matches -

including help message output and things the bot says in a channel

• Generally stick to “respond” style responders• Keep real app logic outside responders• Consider starting with your bot inside an umbrella app• Hedwig_slack locks a version of cowlib that conflicts with

phoenix. Can’t run them inside same app.• Get 2 tokens (1 prod, 1 dev)• Make a dedicated channel for bot testing

Erik DeBill@edebill

erik@debill.org