An outgoing webhook will send an HTTP POST request from a specified URL. This simple app creates a bot in your slack workspace that responds to a post request and returns a polite greeting. Here, I create an endpoint of /hello with a payload message containing a text key, which prints a string that greets the user.
In the package.json you'll see a couple of required dependencies including express, request and body-parser. Make sure you run npm install before running the code, as you will need to define a port.
- Create a Slack App if you haven't already.
- Before testing the app we'll need to deploy the code to a publicly accessible server. For this, we used Heroku. You can find deployment instructions here.
- Once you have your heroku url, open your slack app directory.
- Add a new outgoing webhook and fill out the integration form with your heroku url, name your bot! Ours is Batbot 🦇. Batbot respondes to messages that start with the words: "hello", "hi" and "hey".
- Every time the user types in the trigger words a request is sent to the heroku URL and the automated message is printed.
- Test it out!
