Here's a simple Slack bot using NodeJS and the slack-client node package. The repository is packaged to work on local & distant environments (on your server or Heroku for example).
The bot is capable of handling some commands by default :
!ask: Magic 8 Ball (see Wikipedia)!poll add My question: Add a poll on the current channel with "My question" as the question!random: Pick a random number between 1 and 10!random x: Pick a random number between 1 and x!surprise: Well, it's not a suprise if I tell you, right?!cat: Display a cat GIF from thecatapi.com
You can easily add a command by forking the project and edit the slack-bot.js file.
You need to have a Slack token to connect the bot to your Slack. You can create one there :
You'll be able to customize the username, avatar, and profile informations of your bot. More importantly you'll be able to see your API token. It looks like that : xoxb-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Open slack-bot.js. Look at the top of the file for var token = 'YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN' and replace YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN by your token (you need the keep the single quotes around the token).
You can also define other constants :
var auto_reconnect = true: set to false to disable auto-reconnect on Slack errorsvar auto_mark_as_read = true: set to false to disable auto-mark-as-read message after it is processed
Clone the repository, edit the configuration variables and run :
node slack-bot.js
It should output :
Connected to Slack. You are YOUR_BOT_NAME on YOUR_TEAM_SLACK_NAME
If you point your browser to http://localhost:8080, it should output Your Slack bot is up and running.
You can use forever to run and manage the Slack bot.