Alfred Slack Bot

Your personal butler created using BotKit

Installation

To install all dependencies just run

npm install

You also need a mongo database running

To run Alfred you need some environment variables:

• FORECAST_API_KEY for the weather service, get one from here
• GM_API_KEY for the geocoding service used by time or weather, get one from here
• WOLFRAM_APPID for the wolfram integration, get one from here
• SLACK_TOKEN to be able to receive and send messages from slack

To set up Alfred on your Slack team you need to add the Bots integration, you can search on it or go to http://<your slack domain>/apps/new/A0F7YS25R-bots. You will be able to set your bot's name, handle and you will get the SLACK_TOKEN.

Run

To run Alfred just do

npm start

Current commands

• Say hi or hello to receive a greating

• Say my name is {name} or call me {name} if you want me to remember your name

• Say help to get these options

• Say subscribe to my PRs to get messages about the updates on your PRs

• Say unsubscribe from PRs to stop receiving the updates on your PRs

• Say weather {location} to get a forecast

• Say greet or greetings to make me greet everyone

• Say time {location} to get a local time

• Say stackoverflow {language/tag} {query} to get the first result on stackoverflow for that query

• Say random pick set {comma separated list} to set up the list for a random pick, this could be people's names or any other list of things

• Say random pick get to get a random pick from a list set before hand

• Say rota pick set {comma separated list} to set up the list for a rota pick, this could be people's names or any other list of things

• Say rota pick get to get a rota pick from a list set before hand

All non matched commands will be resolved using the wolfram command.

Collaborate

Adding new features to Alfred is really easy and can be done in two steps:

The first step is to add your feature on lib/commands/index.js like this:

{
  patterns: ['call me (.*)', 'my name is (.*)'],
  scope   : normalScope,
  handler : 'name',
  help    : 'Say `my name is {name}` or `call me {name}` if you want me to remember your name'
}

• patterns is an array with all things you want Alfred to be listening to as a trigger, these really are regular expressions so you can take advantage to matching patterns, in this example we want to match whatever comes after call me or my name is.

• scope are the events when Alfred should be listening, the normalScope is direct_message,direct_mention,mention which should work for most cases.

• handler is the name of the file of your handler and it should be placed inside the lib/commands folder, on this example the file is lib/commands/name.js.

• help is the explanation for your feature that will appear when someone asks for help.

The second step is to create the handle function, lets look at the example:

const { controller } = require('../controller');
const utils          = require('../utils');

module.exports = (bot, message) => {
  let name = message.match[1];

  controller.storage.users.get(message.user, function(err, user) {
    if (err) return utils.handleStorageError(err, bot, message);

    if (!user) {
      user = {
        userId: message.user
      };
    }
    user.name = name;
    controller.storage.users.save(user, function(err, id) {
      if (err) return utils.handleStorageError(err, bot, message);

      utils.addReaction(bot, message, '+1');
      bot.reply(message, 'Understood. I will call you ' + user.name + ' from now on.');
    });
  });
};

Like you see our handler receives two arguments bot and message.

The bot variable will allow us to reply to the message.

The message is an object that contains several things like:

• All the matched strings from our regexp
• The text of the message
• The user id who triggered the message
• The channel
• etc

If we need to access the storage to save or retrieve information about the current user we need to import the controller (as seen on the first line).

And also import the utils module to handle possible storage errors for us and add a reaction to the message.

You can also do more complex things like a multi-message conversation check an example on the subscribePR file.

Once you've created your feature, submit a PR!