So the way that Slack's RTM bot project works

is that all of your Slack bots plugins live in this plugins directory.

Now they can be a single file or they can be a directory of files.

If you find that you need more than one file for

a plugin you definitely want to use a directory, and

then put stuff wherever it makes sense in individual modules.

If everything's compact and simple, then one file is fine.

I'm gonna be using directories for both of these plugins,

even though they're really simple and could be done with single files.

I like the directories, just because things might grow.

So the first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna make a new folder.

The first one I'm gonna do is the motivation plugin.

So I'm gonna make a folder in here called motivation.

And then inside of this motivation directory,

I'm gonna make a file inside there that's named motivation.py.

Okay, so now I have this file and it's blank.

And the kinda cool thing, is that the Slackbot doesn't really have

a whole lot of requirements for how these plugins are created.

You can do a lot of just kind of however you want.

But there are two special important variables that you'll find yourself

using a lot.

So the first one is outputs, which is an empty list, and

the next one is crontable, which is also an empty list.

Now the outputs variable lets you send output to different channels and users,

which are one and the same thing in Slack.

The crontable controls timed operations, like if you were doing a plugin to

remind users about something after a certain time, or you wanted to send out

an update every day at noon saying hey everybody, go get lunch.

I can delete the crontable one,

because I'm not gonna be doing any crontable stuff.

I'm going to leave it though, just because it's good to have as a reminder.

Maybe I find myself wanting to use it later.

The only other thing that is definitely

required by the slack bot is the functions that are used to handle different events.

So they all start with the word process, so def process.

And then after that is whatever event you want to handle.

So for both the plugins that I'm gonna be building, I wanna trigger things based on

message events, so when someone types a message into a channel.

So I'm going to name these process_message,

because we're processing messages and they always take a variable named data.

It doesn't have to be named data, but I have a single variable which represents

all the data from the event that's coming in.

Now inside of here I can do whatever I need to do.

So let's see, to start I'm just gonna look for

messages that start with an exclamation mark and an M, or !m.

So if data ("text"), which is the key that contains the text of the message

.lower().startswith("!m"), then I need to do something.

Now I wanna make some sort of output for the plugin, and to do that,

I have to append something to the outputs list.

Each item in the outputs list is itself a list with two items.

The first item is the channel to send the output to.

This can be a public channel, a private channel, a user's DM,

a group DM, whatever.

Anywhere that the bot is present, the bot has to be there.

So if you're talking to the bot, then the bot 's there.

If the bot 's in your channel, which right now you can see there's only one member,

then the bot 's there.

So we'll have to invite the bot into the channel before we can actually use the bot

in the channel.

And the second thing you send back is the text you wanna send to the channel.

So I'll do outputs.append, and then the first thing I want to append,

which let's see, let's make this a list here.

And like that and okay.

So the first thing I need to send is the data ["channel"].

So this is the channel that the message came in on.

I'm just gonna send it right back to that channel.

And I'm gonna send "Great job!".

Okay, so pretty simple.

So we'll start the bot.

And then like I said, the bot's online, but

I need to invite the bot to the channel.

So I'll do /invite@frog_bot, And now frog_bot's in the channel.

Okay, so now if I send a message, hey froggy,

then nothing shows up anywhere.

But if I do !m froggy, then frog_bot comes back with great job.

So great, I have the bot working super basic how I want.

Now I want this plugin to be more sophisticated though, so

I need to add some more functionality to it.

So the first thing that I wanna do, is I wanna have a bit better of a trigger for

messages that are appropriate for the bot to respond to.

As part of that, I think I can catch whether or

not an individual person was mentioned in the message.

So to do that, I'm gonna import the RE library.

No, not review, what are you doing, Adam?

[LAUGH] And then I'm gonna make a new variable here that I'll call

trigger_message, which those are just a way for

me to know whether or not the message triggered the bot.

So I'll do re.compile, and then if the beginning

of the string is !m, maybe a space maybe not.

And then @, And then a username,

And then whenever you're looking at usernames in Slack,

the actual message always ends up with the username being inside of less than and

greater than symbols, kind of like HTML tags.

So if there's that, then, And that can be re.I.

There we go, make this a little wider.

Okay, so it starts with !m.

It may or may not have a space, and it may or may not have a user name inside of it.

Okay, so that's cool.

So if that happens, then I want to do the message.

So I'm gonna do a new thing here.

I'm gonna do catch = trigger_message,match(data'[text']),

and if catch.

So if something got caught, then username = catch.groupdict and ['user'].

Now the groupdict is always gonna have a user in it, no matter what.

But there may or may not be something inside of there, maybe none.

So if username is not None:, so

if there is a username, then user = _lookup_user.

Which I'm gonna have to write in the minute with the username that came in.

And I want the message to be, That

.format (user['user'] and [name].

So this _lookup_user method that I'm going to write in a minute, or

function I'm gonna write in a minute, will go and look up the user in Slack's API and

send us back their user object, which has a user field.

And inside of that user field, there's a name field.

If I don't have a user name, then text is going to be = data['text'],

whatever came out there, and then everything that's past that, right?

So I've got the exclamation mark as 0, I've got the m as 1,

I have a space as 2, so I want from 3 on, right?

And then the message is going to be text if there's anything there,

or random.choice from (group_pronouns).

All right, and then outputs.append.

This is the same idea as before, data["channel"], and

then I'm gonna add a little bit of emoji to this.

So, I'm going to add in a ":tada:, and then that, an !, and another :tada:".

And then let's format this with random.choice(congratulations),

which is another list I'm gonna have to create in a minute.

And the message that was generated by our stuff, by this one or this one.

Okay, so let's go back over this and then I'll add in the methods and

stuff that we need.

So we have a regex that catches !m and

then an optional space and an optional username.

And then we have the, (data['text'], all right?

There has to be some text there.

And we try to catch it, we catch to see if the thing gets triggered.

If it does, then we check to see if there's a username.

If there's a username then we're gonna look up that user and

use their name in the message.

If there's not, then we're gonna grab whatever comes out after the !m.

And then we're gonna send either that back if there's something there, or

we're going to send back a random group pronoun.

So great work everyone kind of thing, and

then we're gonna pin that to the channel with a little bit of emoji.

Okay, so what about this _lookup_user and these other two things?

Well, first of all, I'm using random in here twice,

so let's go ahead and import random.

And then I want to create a couple of new lists.

And the first of these is gonna be the congratulations list,

which I always had to think about how to spell that.

So I'm just gonna add in a few things here.

I'll do "Great job", "Amazing", "You rock",

"OMG", and "You're awesome".

And maybe one more, let's just do "Great work".

Okay, and look, I talked about I had to think about it every time, and

then I misspelled it still, crongratulations, congratulations.

Okay, and then the other one I need to do is the group_pronouns.

And in here I'll just do good words for everyone as a group,

because I'm congratulating the whole room at that point.

"everyone", "everybody",

"y'all" one of my favorites, "mortals",

"peeps", "folks", and how about "minions"?

Some of those are a little tongue-in-cheek, I guess.

All right, so those are good.

Now though, I need to create this _lookup_user method or function.

So lookup_user is gonna take a (user):, and it's gonna return

slack_client.api_call, which uses the Slack client to make an API call.

And then, you specify the endpoint, which is gonna be "users.info".

And then, you specify any arguments that you want to send through.

And the user is gonna be the user that comes through there.

Now to use this, I need to import slack_client, and that is

from client import slack_client.

So this is a little library you can see right here client.py.

That's the one that will connect to Slack and

give you a client out to the user, or out to the API.

Okay, so more complicated plugin, but

nothing really weird here, all fairly simple stuff.

So, let's restart the bot, And

so now, I should be able to do !m with my name,

nd the frog_bot should respond with Great job@kennethlove, all right.

One thing to notice is this doesn't highlight my name.

I don't believe bot users are allowed to mention people, so it'll have their name.

If they have highlight set up or whatever, it should highlight because of that but,

it's not gonna ping them if they're, for instance, away.

And let's see, if I just put in !m Kenneth then I get You rock Kenneth.

And if I just do !m I get You rock peeps!, so that's the message for the whole group.

So that's awesome, got the whole thing working.