Hedwig Slack Adapter

A Slack Adapter for Hedwig

Getting started

Let's generate a new Elixir application with a supervision tree:

λ mix new alfred --sup
* creating README.md
* creating .gitignore
* creating mix.exs
* creating config
* creating config/config.exs
* creating lib
* creating lib/alfred.ex
* creating test
* creating test/test_helper.exs
* creating test/alfred_test.exs

Your Mix project was created successfully.
You can use "mix" to compile it, test it, and more:

    cd alfred
    mix test

Run "mix help" for more commands.

Change into our new application directory:

λ cd alfred

Add hedwig_slack to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [{:hedwig_slack, "~> 1.0"}]
end

Ensure hedwig_slack is started before your application:

def application do
  [applications: [:hedwig_slack]]
end

Generate our robot

λ mix hedwig.gen.robot

Welcome to the Hedwig Robot Generator!

Let's get started.

What would you like to name your bot?: alfred

Available adapters

1. Hedwig.Adapters.Slack
2. Hedwig.Adapters.Console
3. Hedwig.Adapters.Test

Please select an adapter: 1

* creating lib/alfred
* creating lib/alfred/robot.ex
* updating config/config.exs

Don't forget to add your new robot to your supervision tree
(typically in lib/alfred.ex):

    worker(Alfred.Robot, [])

Supervise our robot

We'll want Alfred to be supervised and started when we start our application. Let's add it to our supervision tree. Open up lib/alfred.ex and add the following to the children list:

worker(Alfred.Robot, [])

Configuration

The next thing we need to do is configure our bot for our XMPP server. Open up config/config.exs and let's take a look at what was generated for us:

use Mix.Config

config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
  adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.Slack,
  name: "alfred",
  aka: "/",
  responders: [
    {Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.Ping, []}
  ]

So we have the adapter, name, aka, and responders set. The adapter is the module responsible for handling all of the Slack details like connecting and sending and receiving messages over the network. The name is the name that our bot will respond to. The aka (also known as) field is optional, but it allows us to address our bot with an alias. By default, this alias is set to /.

Finally we have responders. Responders are modules that provide functions that match on the messages that get sent to our bot. We'll discuss this further in a bit.

We'll need to provide a few more things in order for us to connect to our Slack server. We'll need to provide our bot's API key as well as a list of rooms we want our bot to join once connected. Let's see what that looks like:

use Mix.Config

config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
  adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.Slack,
  name: "alfred",
  aka: "/",
  # fill in the appropriate API token for your bot
  token: "some api token",
  # for now, you can invite your bot to a channel in slack and it will join
  # automatically
  rooms: [],
  responders: [
    {Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.Ping, []}
  ]

Great! We're ready to start our bot. From the root of our application, let's run the following:

λ mix run --no-halt

This will start our application along with our bot. Our bot should connect to Slack and join the rooms it's in based on its Slack integration. From there, we can chat with our bot in any Slack client.

Since we have the Help responder installed, we can say alfred help and we should see a list of usage for all of the installed responders.

What's next?

Well, that's it for now. Make sure to read the Hedwig Documentation for more details on writing responders and other exciting things!

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2016, Sonny Scroggin.

Hedwig Slack source code is licensed under the MIT License.