About Slack's RTM API

Hi everyone. 0:05 Slack has quickly become a popular tool for online communities and companies. 0:06 If you're like me though chat software is only as good as your ability to 0:10 bend it to your will. 0:13 Slack has a few different APIs that you can use for your tools. 0:15 But the most common one is the real time messaging or RTM API. 0:18 You might be thinking that an API that just deals with messages 0:23 wouldn't be the most powerful and you're right that wouldn't be, but 0:25 in slack almost all in app events are sent as messages. 0:29 So you can use the RTM API to trigger events when users create a channel, 0:33 change their away status or many other things. 0:37 In this workshop though we're going to focus on messages posted by users but 0:40 the tools and approaches we're going to use are applicable to all message types. 0:43 The RTM API is what most Slack bots will use because bots usually operate in 0:47 channels and have their own presence. 0:51 They show up as users for a lot of use cases bot users though don't have 0:54 all of the same privileges as regular users. 0:58 For instance bot users can't join channels on their own, 1:01 in this workshop we're going to give our bot two different abilities. 1:04 The first will be a trigger command to make the bot congratulate someone on doing 1:07 something awesome. 1:10 The second will randomly select a message and 1:12 change a random noun in that message to a word of my choosing. 1:14 Before we start you'll need a slack team that you can add bot users to. 1:18 So go sign up for one of those if you don't have one already. 1:21 Next I'll show you how to add a bot and we'll get started. 1:24 So before you can start on this whole thing you have to have a Slack channel 1:27 that you can add integrations to and then you'll have this little drop down here. 1:31 It's the same in the slack app and just on the slack website. 1:35 So, click that dropdown and then click Apps and Integrations and 1:40 you'll get this Generic App Directory page and there's some cool stuff in here. 1:43 I suggest looking through it but I want to build one of my own. 1:48 So, I'm going to hit Build and then I'm building something just for my team, so 1:51 I'm going to choose Make a Custom Integration and 1:55 then I'm going to choose Bots and I want to make new bot. 1:57 Now, all I have to do is give this bot a username, 2:00 our treehouse mascot is Mike the frogs. 2:03 So I'm going to call this one frog bot and I'm going to say add bot integration and 2:05 you'll see that slack is going to give me this API token and 2:10 you want to be sure and not share this API token with anybody. 2:14 So when I'm done with this workshop, I'm going to go and regenerate this one so 2:19 that this will not be the token that actually works. 2:23 So I'm gonna take this token and I'm gonna copy it. 2:26 Now, the next thing that you need to do I've already done this, but 2:31 the next thing you need to do is to go to this git hub repo, 2:34 there's a link in the teacher's notes. 2:38 And this is the python-rtmbot repo by slackhq, so this comes from slack. 2:40 This is their recommended way of building RTM or real time messaging bots in Python. 2:46 So you clone this library and then we need to configure it. 2:53 So just clone it and then inside of there, let's see. 2:58 I'm going to show you better. 3:02 This is it cloned and then inside of there, I have my virtual environment. 3:03 Which already have activated. 3:07 Now, I need to make one new file inside of here and 3:08 that file is called RTMbot.conf. 3:14 So I'm going to choose New File. 3:19 RTMbot.conf and so this is a COMF file I'm pretty sure this is in the YAML format. 3:21 That's what it seems to be it only needs two variables, 3:29 the first variable it needs is debug and I'm going to set this to true. 3:33 And the second one is slack token. 3:37 And this is the token that slack gave you for your bot. 3:40 Setting debug to true will make the bot crash. 3:44 If it encounters an error, if something goes wrong, it will crash and 3:47 give you you know output on what went wrong. 3:51 If debug set to false, it doesn't seem to crash and give you the output. 3:54 It just kind of ignores the thing that went wrong and and carries on. 3:57 And then your slack token of course is your slack token. 4:01 Okay so I've got that saved and now I need to install the requirements. 4:04 So there is this requirements .txt file 4:09 I'm gonna do pip3 install dash requirements.txt. 4:15 All right, so now I have several things installed here that the bot needs 4:22 in order to be able to run and if I run the bot it should be able to connect. 4:27 So let's try. 4:32 Let's see python rtmbot.py. 4:35 I need a colon right there. 4:42 And now if I come back over here to Slack, I should see the bot is connected. 4:49 There is a green dot. 4:54 All right, so the bots all set up and 4:55 in the next video we'll build our first plugin. 4:58