Slacktivate bot

Pull messages out of SPC Slack based on reactions and put them into more useful places.

To develop

To get started:

• virtualenv -p python3 venv
• source ./venv/bin/activate
• pip install -r requirements.txt

• cat > slacktivate.cfg << EOF
  SLACK_TOKEN = "XXXXXX"
  DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN = "YYYYYY"
  SLACK_DOMAIN = "https://ZZZZZZ.slack.com"
  EOF
  

• PORT=5000 SLACKTIVATE_CONFIG=slacktivate.cfg ./start.sh

You may want ngrok or something similar to serve from your local machine and a test Slack community.

To deploy

This code is already set up to deploy automatically on Render from the deploy branch on Github. You should not have to do anything other than push to that branch during normal usage.

However, if you want to re-deploy the bot to a different server or add capabilities, you may have to edit Slack permissions or re-authorize the bot on Slack. (Slacktivate is connected in development mode, not packaged as a "real" production Slack bot would be.) To authorize on Slack:

• Log in to Slack as the bot owner.
• If the bot doesn't own Slacktivate for some reason, go to api.slack.com and tell Slack that you want to build a new app (called Slacktivate, of course.)
• Required features (these may change! please update if you add one):
  • Event subscriptions: reaction_added (You will also have to add and verify the subscription URL. This is https://APP_DEPLOYMENT_URL/event .)
  • Permissions: channels:history, channels:read, chat:write:bot, reactions:read, users:read
• Install the app to the workspace (if it's not there) and add the OAuth token to the slacktivate.cfg in deployment. (For SPC, do this through the Render UI.)
• If you need to enable Dropbox auth: go to https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps/create and create a new Dropbox API app with full access. Click "generate access token" on the app's config page and add that to slacktivate.cfg on Render.

Example Behavior

Users invoke the slactivate bot by adding a :twitter: emoji or a :faq: emoji to a comment in slack. These are custom emojis that you can add to slack. They are found here: and here: and also in this repo's /custom-emoji folder.

Here's what the twitter emoji does: it creates a draft tweet in a separate slack channel #tweetdrafts. Then the user can click a button there to have a tweet draft created in twitter in their browser, ready to be edited and tweeted.

      

Similarly, the :faq: emoji invokes an external response. In this case the response is to add the info from the slack comment to a faq doc, in this case in our Dropbox paper doc.