Ecosyste.ms: Awesome
An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.
https://github.com/camunda-community-hub/slack-archivist
A Slackbot that archives threads to Discourse and suggests previous threads that may answer a user question
https://github.com/camunda-community-hub/slack-archivist
discourse slack slack-bot
Last synced: about 1 month ago
JSON representation
A Slackbot that archives threads to Discourse and suggests previous threads that may answer a user question
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/camunda-community-hub/slack-archivist
- Owner: camunda-community-hub
- Created: 2020-02-05T00:49:51.000Z (almost 5 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2023-12-14T20:14:09.000Z (about 1 year ago)
- Last Synced: 2024-04-14T15:01:44.411Z (9 months ago)
- Topics: discourse, slack, slack-bot
- Language: TypeScript
- Homepage:
- Size: 1.4 MB
- Stars: 23
- Watchers: 4
- Forks: 4
- Open Issues: 19
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
[](https://github.com/camunda-community-hub/community)
[](https://github.com/Camunda-Community-Hub/community/blob/main/extension-lifecycle.md#stable-)
# Slack Archivist
Your friendly Slack-to-Discourse archivist.
This is a Slack bot that can ship threads off to a Discourse instance as forum posts on request.
It was inspired by Dgraph's [Wisemonk](https://github.com/dgraph-io/wisemonk), and built for the [Zeebe.io](https://zeebe.io) community Slack.
One of the issues with hosting a community on Slack is the loss of history. Valuable discussions and answers to questions quickly scroll over the 10,000 message horizon. A number of technical communities have moved to Discord to deal with this.
We looked at doing that, but then saw an opportunity to build a searchable knowledge base on our [forum](https://forum.zeebe.io) by sending valuable threads there as posts. There they can be curated by editors, indexed by Google, and discovered by other members of our community searching for answers.
Dgraph had a similar idea a few years ago, and built Wisemonk in Go. It hasn't been updated for a few years, and I couldn't get it to work - so I coded this up in TypeScript, using Slack's Web API and Events API.
## Using in Slack
In a thread (this is important - your conversations need to be threaded), @ the bot with what you want as the title. The bot will then roll up the thread and turn it into a forum post.
Example:
Here is [the post](https://forum.zeebe.io/t/zeebe-failover/980) generated from this thread.
## Prerequisites
Obviously you will need a Slack where you can add bot users, and a Discourse instance where you can get an API key. You will also need to run the bot with a resolvable DNS address, or at least an external IP, as it needs to listen to Push notifications from Slack's Event API.
Here are the [instructions about creating a bot user on Slack](https://api.slack.com/bot-users). You only need to do steps 1 - 3.
The bot will need the following scopes in its OAuth settings:
- app_mentions:read
- channels:history
- channels:join
- channels:read
- chat:write
- im:history
- im:read
- im:write
- incoming-webhook
- links:read
- links:write
- reactions:write
- users.profile:read
- users:read
- users:write
You will need to set up the Event Subscriptions for the bot, like this:
## Database
The Slack Archivist bot uses a PouchDB to track the threads that it has archived. The database is created locally using the leveldown adapter in the `slack-archivist-db` directory, so you should mount that into the docker container to ensure its persistence across container lifecycles.
You can optionally provide a `COUCHDB_URL` via the environment to sync the database with a remote CouchDB instance. This is recommended to ensure the persistence of data. You can start a CouchDB instance easily in Google Cloud using [Bitnami](https://bitnami.com/stack/couchdb/cloud/google), or use [IBM Cloudant](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant).
## Running from Docker
Read the `docker-compose.yml` file and set up either the environment variables or a `.env` file. Then run:
```
docker-compose up -d
```
If you want to run this using https, you can do it easily using the [Nginx / LetsEncrypt Docker sidecar](https://github.com/jwulf/letsencrypt-nginx-sidecar).
## Installation from source
To install, clone the repository, then run:
```
npm i
```
## Configuration
You configure Slack Archivist via environment variables:
```
# Required
DISCOURSE_TOKEN
DISCOURSE_USER
DISCOURSE_CATEGORY
DISCOURSE_URL
SLACK_TOKEN
SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET
SLACK_BOTNAME
# Optional
SLACK_PORT # Default: 3000
COUCHDB_URL # For syncing
LOG_LEVEL # winston log level. Default: info
```
You can set these through your environment, or put them into a `.env` file.
Rename `env` to `.env`, and fill in your Slack bot and Discord details.
The message templates for the Slack Archivist messages can be found in the `messages` directory.
## Running
You can run the bot using `ts-node`:
```
npm i -g ts-node
ts-node src/main.ts
```
Or by transpiling to JS:
```
npm run build
npm run start
```
You can also deploy the bot using docker, following the instructions and template in the `deploy` directory.
## Bot Behaviour
The bot behaviour is described in the [Behaviour.bpmn](Behaviour.bpmn) file.
## Livestream
I livestreamed a lot of the coding:
- [Building a Slack bot - Slack Archivist for the Zeebe Community: Part 1 of 2](https://youtu.be/v5CkZb-xlBc)
- [Building a Slack bot - Slack Archivist for the Zeebe Community: Part 2 of 2](https://youtu.be/n3zDiqRgW0o)
## Resources
- [Slack event JSON Schema](https://github.com/slackapi/slack-api-specs/blob/master/events-api/slack_common_event_wrapper_schema.json)
## Questions?
Come by #nodejs on the [Camunda 8 Slack](https://www.camunda.com/slack).