Build a scheduler Slack bot!

Build a Slack bot slash command that adds events to your personal calendar!

/scheduleme "Chocolate chip cookie competition" "Sunday at 2pm" "Sunday at 4pm"

Slack bots are fun ways to add new functionality into your Slack workspace. Using the Nylas API, you can create a bot
with email, contacts or calendar functionality. In this tutorial, you are going to create a scheduler bot that adds events to your personal calendar with a simple Slack slash command. We’ll dive into the nitty gritty of how to build a Slack bot from scratch.

Checkout this post for the full instructions!

What You’ll Need Beforehand

There are a few technologies that we need to have in place before we embark on this DIY Slack bot journey!

Git and Github account
Heroku account
Slack workspace
An email address associated with a Google, iCloud, or Microsoft calendar
A text editor of your choosing — PyCharm, Atom, Vim, Sublime, etc.

Overview

Part 0: Basic app setup

TLDR; Fork the starter code, run the setup script and run the app locally

Part 1: Hook your repo up to Heroku and deploy it

TLDR; Create a Heroku app, hook it up to your Github repo, deploy it

Part 2: Set up Heroku config variables

TLDR; Auth an account with Nylas to get the access token, use this to get the ID of the calendar, add these plus the calendar timezone as config variables in Heroku.

Part 3: Connect your app to your Slack workspace

TLDR; Create a Slack App and configure a slash command to communicate with your app, add a route in your app that listens for the slash command

Part 4: Add text parsing functionality

TLDR; Parse the text sent from Slack into meaningful components for an event

Part 5: Build scheduling functionality

TLDR; Send the parsed arguments to the /events endpoint of the Nylas API to create an event on your calendar.

joshsgoldstein/slackbot