Skit is a simple tool/library written in Go (or Golang) for building Slack bots. Skit pre-compiled binary is good enough to build simple slack bots. For more complex usecases skit can be used as a library as well.

Simply download the pre-built binary for your platform from the Releases section.

Release archive will contain a skit.toml file with some sample handlers setup. To run this default setup:

1. Create a bot on slack by following Documentation
2. Set slack token generated for the bot in skit.toml
3. Run skit -c skit.toml
4. Go to slack and find the bot which you created and chat!

Following skit.toml file can be used to setup a simple slack bot that passes any message sent to it to a shell script bot.sh. The output of this script will be sent back as the response.

token = "your-token-here"
log_level = "info"

[[handlers]]
name = "matcha_all"
type = "command"
match = [
  ".*"
]
cmd = "./bot.sh"
args = [
  "{{ .event.Text }}"
]

See examples/ for samples of different handler configurations.

Following sample shows how to build a simple bot that echo's everything you say to it!

sk:= skit.New("your-token", logrus.New())
sk.Register("echo_all", skit.SimpleHandler("{{.event.Text}}",  ".*"))
sk.Listen(context.Background())

A handler is an implementation of skit.Handler interface. A handler is responsible for consuming event, processing and responding to it when applicable. Currently 3 types of handlers are available.

• simple handler can be used to build simple regex based conversational bot.

• Following sample shows how to configure simple handler:

  [[handlers]]
  name = "simple_bot"
  type = "simple"
  match = [
    "my name is (?P<name>.*)"
  ]
  message = "Hello there {{ .name }}!"

• command handler can be used to delegate the message handling responsibility to external command

• This allows building bots which are more complex than the ones built with simple

• Following sample shows how to configure command handler:

  [[handlers]]
  name = "external_command"
  type = "command"
  match = [
    ".*"
  ]
  cmd = "./hello.sh"
  args = [
    "{{ .event.Text }}"
  ]
  timeout = "5s"

• lua allows writing handlers using Lua script which will be executed using embedded Gopher-Lua

• Lua code will have access to skit instance and its APIs and can be used build complex bots.

• You can provide paths to be added to LUA_PATH as paths in the following config.

• In the config sample below, source can be any valid lua code. So you can put your handler code in a file (e.g., handler.lua) under one of the paths and use source="require('handler')" in the handler config.

• Following sample shows how to configure lua handler:

  [[handlers]]
  name = "lua_handler"
  type = "lua"
  handler = "handle_event"
  paths = []
  source = """
    function handle_event(ctx, sk, event)
      sk:SendText(ctx, "Hello from Lua!", event.Channel)
      return true
    end
  """