This document provides information about using the Hedwig Slack bot plugin for Elixir. It discusses self-promotion, getting started by following the Hedwig_slack README, generating a robot worker, configuring tokens, and using responders and macros to handle messages. Suggestions are given such as using "respond" style responders instead of "hear" to avoid loops, keeping app logic separate from responders, and getting separate dev and prod tokens to avoid rate limits.

1. Slack Bots With
Hedwig

2. Self Promotion
• Erik DeBill
• @edebill and @parsenome on twitter
• https://github.com/edebill

3. Spredfast Pays Me
• https://www.spredfast.com/
• We’ve got lots of really interesting problems and
a truly polyglot architecture

4. Hedwig Slack
• Plugin for hedwig-im
• You need to use the
github/master version instead
of published hex.pm
• Maintainer answers questions
in #hedwig channel on Elixir
slack
• Documentation is fairly good
for the basics
• See Elixir Sips episodes

5. Bootstrapping
• follow steps on Hedwig_slack
README
• mix new myapp —sup
• cd myapp
• add hedwig_slack to deps
• mix deps.get
• mix deps.compile

6. Robot Generator
• Works about like you’d expect
• Prompts you to add a worker
to your supervision tree. If you
didn’t add the —sup option
when you ran mix new this will
be hard to figure out

7. Config.exs
• Last of the boilerplate
• Follow README on how to
add to config.exs
• I recommend 2 tokens - one
dev, one test (rate limits will
eat you)
• Responders are where the
interesting stuff live

8. Getting a Token

9. Responders
• modules that use
Hedwig.Responder
• ‘hear’ and ‘respond’ macros
• chime in vs answer question
• can regex capture

10. At this point, we’ve
covered all the basics
from the docs

11. after_connect
• Called after connection
established
• Use to register bot so outside
code can find it

12. Sending Without
Responders
• Figure out pid for your bot
• Figure out channel id
(IO.inspect inside a responder
works great - these remain
stable forever)
• Format a Hedwig.Message
with room, text, and type

13. Suggestions
• “hear” responders will respond to ANYTHING that matches -
including help message output and things the bot says in a channel
• Generally stick to “respond” style responders
• Keep real app logic outside responders
• Consider starting with your bot inside an umbrella app
• Hedwig_slack locks a version of cowlib that conflicts with phoenix.
Can’t run them inside same app.
• Get 2 tokens (1 prod, 1 dev)
• Make a dedicated channel for bot testing

14. Erik DeBill
@edebill
erik@debill.org