Building a Karma Bot with Python and the Slack API

We love Slack! But what if we can make it even cooler? Imagine: you are geeking out with your fellow developers on Slack and you want to give them credit. Or you can write “stupidsubject–” and it automagically shows “stupidsubject’s karma decreased to -2”. Enter Karma Bot. This is nothing new but building one myself was a great learning exercise and a fun tool we use on our Slack now.

I will show you how I implemented our Karma Bot using Slack’s Real Time Messaging API. I hope to extend it into an open source package later on adding tests, docs, setup file, etc. I will document progress in future articles.

Setup

This exercise is similar to our How to Build a Simple Slack Bot article. First you create a bot user and get an API_KEY from Slack.

The bot user needs to be defined as ID so you need to retrieve it for which I made a helper script:

$ python3 -m utils.get_botid
Bot ID for 'karmabot' is xyz

(This calls the get_botid.py script in the utils package. More on packaging next week …)

Then I stored the following two env variables in my bashrc:

export SLACK_KARMA_BOTUSER=xyz
export SLACK_KARMA_TOKEN=super-secret

As we will see next week __init__.py makes a folder a package. You can use this file to do setup. I read env variables in, define my (regex) constants, instantiate the SlackClient object to talk to the Slack API, and setup logging and caching. See __init__.py.

Structure

The code for this project is here.

The main.py script is the driver calling methods from the bot package (folder):

• It connects to the Real Time Messaging API with SLACK_CLIENT.rtm_connect().

• Each second it checks our Slack for new messages with the helper parse_next_msg (karma.py) which pings the API with SLACK_CLIENT.rtm_read() and parses the response.

• One of my favorite regex methods findall checks each new message for potential karma actions:

  karma_changes = KARMA_ACTION.findall(text)
  

  where:

  KARMA_ACTION = re.compile(r'(?:^| )(\S{2,}?)\s?([\+\-]{2,})')
  

  This is a complex regex so let me break it down:

  • start of message or preceding space
  • two or more non-space characters
  • one optional space (convenient because Slack’s autocomplete-select of username inserts one)
  • the voting component = two or more +’s and/or -‘s (one + or – led to a lot of false positives!)

• karma.py‘s parse_karma_change is then called to parse out giver, receiver and points. Giver and receiver are returned by the Slack API as IDs so I need slack.py‘s lookup_username to convert them to usernames (which I cache in USERNAME_CACHE).

• Then karma.py‘s change_karma is called to increase/decrease the karma and returns a message for the bot to post.

• Lastly post_msg (slack.py) is called to have the bot post the karma result message back to the same channel the original message (request) came from.

• To keep track of scores I use a Counter object which is stored to disk with pickle. This is setup in __init__.py:

  try:
      logging.info('Retrieving karma cache file')
      karmas = pickle.load(open(KARMA_CACHE, "rb"))
  except FileNotFoundError:
      logging.info('No cache file starting new Counter object in memory')
      karmas = Counter()
  

  … and is backed up every minute with:

  def _save_cache():
      pickle.dump(karmas, open(KARMA_CACHE, "wb"))
  

  I might actually turn this into a real DB.

Deploy

When we built our first Slack bot for How to Build a Simple Slack Bot we needed a way to keep the bot alive even if it crashed or the process was terminated by the OS. For Karma Bot I went with the same workaround as then: a run.sh wrapper that respawns. So if you want to use this code yourself, you would kick it off like this:

$ nohup ./run.sh &

Example

Test session in private Karma Bot channel:

You need to invite the bot to any channel you want to use this in.

More on packaging

My first attempt at this was one big script. I then splitted it out into different modules (responsabilities). Unfortunately I did not commit the initial script to compare. No worries though. Next week I go back to basics on modules and packaging, explaining how they work. I will explain how we import from them which often leads to confusion.

Update 07/08/2017

I refactored this project for Code Challenge 30 – The Art of Refactoring: Improve Your Code, see the review here.

Keep Calm and Code in Python!

— Bob