Hosting Slack Integrations
Every Bot needs a home, every slash command needs a host, and every notification needs to come from somewhere. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the top hosting providers created templates and open source examples for running Slack custom integrations and Slack Apps on their platforms?
Well, your wish has been granted! We’ve worked with your favorite cloud providers to come up with exactly that.
Google Cloud Platfrom
Google Cloud Platform is a set of modular services that allow you to create anything from simple websites to complex applications. Google has released a set of open source code samples that let you run a Slack bot on Google Container Engine, send notifications from a Google Compute Engine instance, and host an auto-scaling slash command on Google App Engine. To get started, read the Google blog post and follow the instructions in the readme for each sample in the repository. For questions and feedback please file a GitHub issue or join the discussion in the Google Cloud Platform Community on Slack.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a growing collection of integrated cloud services including analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web. With App Service, you can build powerful web and mobile apps that connect to data anywhere, including Slack. Using App Service and the open sourced WebJobs SDK, you can listen to outgoing and “slash command” webhooks from Slack to initiate processes and workflows inside your application, as well as send messages directly into Slack.
It is super easy to get started with App Service and the WebJobs SDK. You can get the open source Slack WebJobs extensions from GitHub and join the conversation for any feedback or questions.
AWS Lambda
The easiest way to create and run Slack bots is to use AWS Lambda, a serverless compute platform from Amazon that allows you to run code without provisioning and managing servers. AWS Lambda offers Slack teams an execution platform for automating critical IT tasks that interact directly through chat. Code is simply uploaded and AWS Lambda does the rest, executing the code in response to Slack commands and posting Slack messages in response to alerts. Learn more about AWS Lambda.
Heroku
Heroku is a cloud platform that makes it easy for developers to build, deliver, monitor and scale modern apps. Today Heroku is releasing a guide and series of deployable code samples to teach you how to build your own Slack bots. They start with publishing notifications, then level up to using slash commands, and end by showing you how to build Starbot, a full-fledged bot that lets you keep track of the top trending repos in GitHub. For those who want to get up and running without touching code, you can even one-button deploy the Starbot example.
Beep Boop
Beep Boop is a simple, turnkey hosting platform that automates the configuration, deployment and scaling of Slack bots so you can focus fully on creating, rather than managing, your bots. Entirely integrated with Slack, you can setup and manage your projects from the BeepBoopHQ Slack team. Once your bot is ready to go public, simply enable the Add to Slack button and submit it to Slack’s App Directory. To get started, head over to beepboophq.com or check out the latest getting started tutorial. For questions and feedback, please email hello@beepboophq.com.
api.ai
Api.ai is a development platform That lets you build and host conversational bots. Bots created with Api.ai do not require memorizing commands, they understand users speaking naturally and support multi-step conversations. Creating a Slack bot with Api.ai is easy — provide a few examples of user requests to support, link to a web service implementing your business logic and click “Test in Slack” and “Go Online”.
More to come
We hope that these templates and open source projects will help you create great Slack apps. We are always looking for additional hosting providers, so expect more hosting providers and more sample codes real soon!
For your convenience, we have listed all the cloud providers, together with their tutorials and sample code in our developer site, check it out here.
