meet thanksbot

thanksbot is an open source chat app for Slack that records individual messages of affirmation and shares them periodically with your workspace.

Add to Slack

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

To run this app locally, you will need:

• Node.js
• NPM
• Postgres

To test features locally, you may also want to create your own Slack workspace and use ngrok to serve a publicly available URL to your local bot. This will allow you to use your local server URL in your test Slack workspace setting.

Installing

1. Clone repo and change into the project directory
2. Create a local .env file in the root of your project to manage your development Slack app's secrets. A lot of these values will come from your Slack app's "Basic Information" page in your app's Slack UI.

Below are the .env values you will need:

CIPHER_KEY='choose a string'
CIPHER_IV='a different string here'
SLACK_CLIENT_ID=
SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET=
SLACK_REDIRECT_URI=<use your ngrok URL here>/slack/auth
SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET=

3. Run npm install to install dependencies
4. To set up the database, enter npm run db-init-local
5. Next enter npm run migrate-up to run database migrations.
6. Finally start your local server with npm run dev

Managing Database Changes

We are managing database changes with DB Migrate.

Create a New Migration

To create a new set of database changes, enter npm run migrate-create <name of your migration here> and substitute the angle brackets with your desired file name in kabob case. This will create a new file in migrations where you can fill in your desired database changes.

Once your migration is created, you can apply it to the database with npm run migrate-up and undo it with npm run migrate-down.

Slack Workspace Setup

To recreate this bot in your local environment, there are some changes you will need to make in your dev app's Slack UI.

• "Incoming Webhooks" - switch this feature to "On"
• "Interactivity & Shortcuts"
  • Switch to "On"
  • Add a request URL <your ngrok URL here>/slack/interactions
• "OAuth & Permissions"
  • Add a request URL <your ngrok URL here>/slack/auth
  • Request the following scopes:
    • app_mentions:read
    • channels:history
    • channels:join
    • channels:manage
    • channels:read
    • chat:write
    • chat:write.customize
    • groups:history
    • im:history
    • im:read
    • im:write
• "Event Subscriptions"
  • Switch to "On"
  • Add a request URL <your ngrok URL here>/slack/events. You will need to verify your local server before being able to save this URL.
  • Subscribe to the events message.channels and message.im

Finally head to "Install App" to add your dev app to your test Slack workspace. This will allow you to DM your test bot and have your local server respond.

Handy Scripts

When you're working on thanksbot, you may the following scripts helpful:

npm run list-message <slack team id> - this command will show all of the messages your bot currently has scheduled. For a simple way to find the team id in the Slack UI, take a look at this Stack Overflow Post.

node ./scripts/reminderJob.js - if you are working on the reminder functionality, this command will post a reminder message to the #general channel

Coding style

We're using Prettier and Eslint for maintaining code style consistency. You can use npm run prettier to automatically format your code and then npm run lint to detect any further style problems you need to resolve before submitting a PR.

Deployment

This bot is hosted on Heroku. It uses the master branch for deployment and is deployed manually. Heroku Scheduler executes the script to post a reminder message every week. This script runs daily since Scheduler doesn't offer a weekly cadence, but the script itself checks if the reminder should be posted that day and then posts if so.

Below is a diagram of how the different pieces of the production environment work together:

                      +------------------------------------+
                      |                                    |
                      | Heroku                             |
                      |   hosts:                           |
                      |     * server                       |
          +---------->+     * API token database           +<-----------+
          |           |     * cron jobs (Heroku Scheduler) |            |
          |    +------+   sends responses to Slack         |            |
          |    |      |                                    |            |
          |    |      +------------------------------------+            |
          |    |                                                        |
          |    |                                                        |
          |    v                                                        |
+---------+----+------------+                      +--------------------+-------------------+
|                           |                      |                                        |
| Slack                     |                      | Github                                 |
|  * user interface         |                      | hosts the codebase that Heroku uses to |
|  * sends events to server |                      | deploy the bot's server                |
|                           |                      |                                        |
+---------------------------+                      +----------------------------------------+

Contributing

Try thanksbot out in your organization or community workspace (you may need to get a workspace administrator to install it for you):

• If you find a bug, or think of a feature request, file an issue first so we can document it.
• Want to send in a PR? Fork the repo and issue a PR from your fork:
  • Please cite any issues the PR addresses from the issue tracker
  • Please lint your code before submitting
  • Please test your code locally before submitting
• Wait for review - we will try to review PRs within 5 days of submission, but please be patient.

thanksbot is maintained by @jorydotcom and @kbroida.

Icon by @mjchamplin.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.

Acknowledgments