slack-bgg

A slack integration allowing to interact with BoardGameGeek.com.

The app is a web application (essentially a thin layer between BoardGameGeek and Slack API's), so it requires to be installed (and served) on a machine that has access to (and can be accessed from) the Internet.

Currently it support two functionalities:

• Searches (echoed to the user issuing the command)
• Game details (echoed to the entire channel the user is in)

Usage

Check the application/help.md for up-to date command syntax. The name of the actual command (e.g.: /bgg) will depend by how you set up the integration in the Slack control panel.

Installation

slack-bgg is a python WSGI application. You can serve it the way you prefer (apache, nginx, gunicorn, uWSGI)... For your convenience, there's a handy playbook that allows to get up and running in no time, but please be advised the roles have been written targeting a fresh CentOS 7 virtual machine, so you want to review them thoroughly if you are going to run them onto a machine that hosts other web content...

The easiest way to run the playbook is:

ansible-playbook ansible/slack-bgg.yml -i <IP-here>, --user=<user-name>

Configuration

In order for the app to interact with a Slack instance, you will need to configure both the authentication token sent by Slack to the app and the webhook URL the app should use. These setting must be saved in a file called secrets.ini. You can use the secrets.template as a blueprint for that.

Known limitations

This code is the result of a hackday, so the code works but it's far from a masterpiece. Among the things that annoy me the most (and that I may or may not fix at a later stage):

• Python 2.x rather than 3.x (CentOS has not python3 package)
• Requests to APIs are not async (no python3 → no cake!)
• Sorting of search results is not very useful (try to find the game ID of Risk! or Monopoly if you don't believe me!)
• No pagination for search results

Also, limitations you should be aware that are not due to my code but to Slack API limitations:

• The integration will not work on private channels, if you are trying to display a given game information (will redirect to your slackbot channel instead)
• If you query a search in a given channel, the result will be echoed into your slackbot chat (this may be me having missed some bit of information in the API documentation, though)