Slack birthday-BOT

A slack BOT that simply reminds Birthdays the funny way with animated random Giphy GIFs... for free.

Goal

The goal of this project is to make a "BOT" that wishes happy birthday, on a dedicated channel.

NB : As integration is made thanks to a Webhook, you don't have to add an app to your Slack Team... good for people who are using free plans on Slack.

Requirements

To make this integration operational, all you need is :

• A slack Webhook url dedicated to the birthdays channel (private or public)
• A Giphy API token
• A place to run your daily Job (Travis cron jobs is a good place to do that so all your stuff is in the cloud)...but you can run it wherever you like
• A csv file that contains birthdays data (please take a look at data/birthdays.csv to get a running example)
• A maven runtime (to make things easier to run ...)

All of these items are available for free.

Setup birthdays csv (flat) database

It's all in data/birthdays.csv :

• username and dob are mandatory,
• username must be unique in the csv (the slack username, without the @)
• dob is in format YYYY-MM-DD

Command line

If your are using default csv file (data/birthdays.csv), just run :

mvn exec:java -DgiphyApiKey=YOUR_GIPHY_API_KEY -DslackWebhookUrl=YOUR_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL

If you want to use a custom csv file use the fully qualified command line :

mvn exec:java -DcsvFileName=CSV_FILENAME_PATH -DgiphyApiKey=YOUR_GIPHY_API_KEY -DslackWebhookUrl=YOUR_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL

How to get slack incoming webhook url

• First, install the Incoming WebHooks app : https://slack.com/apps/A0F7XDUAZ-incoming-webhooks
• Configure it to target the #birthdays channel
• Keep the url and keep it secret

Deployment instructions

You can set in up localy on your workstation, on a server but...the best way is to deploy it on the cloud... and Travis CI can help, see dedicated Travis instruction in DEPLOY_ON_TRAVIS.md for that.

Tips

To better manage birthdays greetings, you can create a dedicated branch and cron job only on that branch ;-p ...hence you are ready to perform PR on the project.

Take care to schedule cron in the middle of the morning to get the best effect : it's much more fun to get a live slack than to discover on when you arrive at the office : nothing beats the Slack "tac tac" with a punching GIF !

LinkedIn article

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/birthdays-bots-slack-travis-ci-cron-jobs-all-free-fun-adrien-sales/

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Gabriel Pedro for his very efficient slack-webhook library, and very kind support on my features requests
• Thanks to Mathias Markl for his Giphy4J Giphy lib