Skip to content

Introduction

Philosophy

Slack Machine is a simple, yet powerful and extendable bot framework & platform for Slack.

Slack Machine should be:

  • Full-featured
  • Easy to extend
  • Easy to contribute to (the core)
  • Fun to use
  • Fun to extend

My dream would be, that a community springs up around Slack Machine, that produces a myriad of useful plugins that are easy to install and use.

Non-goals

These are non-goals for me at the moment, but that might change in the future:

  • Support for other backends than Slack
  • Built-in AI. At least not in the core, although whatever intelligence developers put into their plugins, is cool of course

Why Slack Machine was built

I love Slack, and I use it on a daily basis, both at work and in my private life. Due to the powerful APIs that Slack exposes, it's not only great for chatting, but also for automation. We developers love automation, so I wanted to add some of that to the Slack workspaces I'm a member of. Obviously, there have already been many attempts to leverage this extensibility of Slack, considering the many apps/bots/bot frameworks/chatops frameworks out there.

Why build another one?!

All of the options that I could find, were inadequate for some reason. I've used Hubot a lot in the past, but Coffeescript (or Javascript for that matter), just doesn't click with me. I personally feel that Python is a great language to tackle this sort of problem, so I started looking for Slack bots written in Python. At the time I created Slack Machine, these were the options I could find:

  • python-rtmbot: Created by the Slack team, this bot is very barebones and exposes a very low-level plugin API. This makes it hard/tedious to write plugins for it. It is not mainainted anymore
  • slackbot: Has a more high-level plugin API, which is built on the right ideas in terms of developer friendlyness. But it was lacking some features that I want in a bot (among other things: scheduling, persistent storage and a help-feature), and I found that the plugin architecture didn't allow for proper plugin organisation. This made me decide not to contribute, and instead start my own project.
  • Will: This was originally not a bot for Slack, but for Hipchat, but it has support for Slack (and other backends) since a couple of years. I'm including it. Will came closests to what I want, both in terms of feature set and plugin API. At the time I created Slack Machine, it only supported HipChat and I personally found the code quite hard to read. I also feel that a framework supporting many different chat platforms is bound to serve the lowest common denominator. This will lead to suboptimal quality.

So, in the end I decided that writing a full-featured, easy-to-extend Slack bot, written in Python, would be cool new project to take up.

Note

The above was written 4 years ago and a lot has changed since then. The Slack team has created Bolt, a bot framework that is quite similar to Slack Machine. There are still differences in the way code is organized and I feel that Slack Machine is better suited to build complex Slack bots with in which code is organized in multiple plugins. This is currently not supported by Bolt

I plan to keep maintaining Slack Machine and bringing it up to date with current best practices, so that the features and developer experience are on-par with or better than Bolt

Acknowledgements

Slack Machine owes a great deal of debt to the aforementioned packages. Parts of the API of Slack Machine were inspired by those packages, and I was at a great advantage while building Slack Machine because I was able to look at existing code to get an idea on how to approach certain problems. While obviously I'd like to think I have improved upon my inspirations, Slack Machine couldn't have existed without them.

Slack Machine License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2018 Daan Debie

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.