Slack Chat Bot

Configuring in Slack

1. Creating an App

   1. Once logged into a web browser you HAVE to access the apps page by a separate URL. This is not at all obvious https://api.slack.com/apps?new_classic_app=1

   2. Enter an App Name and Select the Workspace to which it will belong and click Create.

   3. Under Add features and functionality click Bots

   4. Then, under First, add a legacy bot user click on the Add Legacy Bot User button. DO NOT CLICK the Update Scopes button!

   5. Enter a name and username for the bot.

   6. Click on Oauth & Permissions in the left-hand nav and the following additional OAuth Scopes. Scroll down about 1/2 on the page until you see the Scopes section. DO NOT click on Update Scopes, click on the Add an OAuth Scope and add the following scopes:

      • channels:history
      • groups:history
      • mpim:history
      • im:history
      • chat:write:bot

   7. In the left-hand nav, click on OAuth & Permissions and then click on Install App to Workspace and then the Allow button on the next screen.

   8. On the resulting screen, copy and paste the OAuth tokens into the yaml config file.

2. Adding the bot to a channel. In the channel to which you want to invite the bot, type the following command /invite @<username> in the message field.

3. Test the credentials.

   1. Create the following test.json file

   {
     "channel":"#my-channel",
     "text":"Hello, World!"
   }
   

   2. Export the following env var and run the following command

export OAUTH_TOKEN=<xob-etc>

curl -X POST \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OAUTH_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-type: application/json;charset=utf-8" \
-d @test.json \
https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage

Deployment

1. Ensure that you have the docker service installed on the host.

2. Test docker and configure the firewall.

   docker run hello-world
   

3. Add a slackchatbot user to the host so that we can run the docker container as a non-root user.

   1. Added slackbot group and on the docker host. We specify the GID and UID because that is what the UID is in the docker image that we will be using.

   groupadd -g 10001 -r slackchatbot && useradd -r -g slackchatbot -u 10001 slackchatbot && usermod -a -G docker slackchatbot
   

4. Create named volumes for the slackchatbot container and set the permissions

   1. Named volume for config files

   docker volume create --name slackchatbot-etc
   chmod 755 /var/lib/docker
   chmod 755 /var/lib/docker/volumes
   

5. Copy the config file to the directory for the slackchatbot-etc dir and chown for slackchatbot

6. Create the log dir and set the permissions.

   mkdir -p /var/log/slackchatbot
   chown -R slackchatbot: /var/log/slackchatbot
   

7. Install the syslog configs and systemd unit file

   1. Copy the etc/systemd/system/slackchatbot.service file to /etc/systemd/system

   restorecon -v /etc/systemd/system/slackchatbot.service
   systemctl daemon-reload
   

   1. Copy the rsyslog.d config file from etc/rsyslog.d/slackchatbot.conf to /etc/rsyslog.d so that all of the logs from the container will go to a dedicated log file.

   restorecon -v /etc/rsyslog.d/slackchatbot.conf
   systemctl restart rsyslog
   

8. Start up and configure slackchatbot:

   systemctl start slackchatbot