Retrospective Bot

Retrospective Bot is a Slack bot that records 'Good', 'Bad' and 'Try' items for the retrospective of the current scrum sprint in an Airtable table.

It is a simple web app designed to be used as a Slack integration. Specifically, it responds to POSTs created by the Slack Slash Commands integration and responds with messages to Slack's Incoming Webhooks integration.

Deploy Retrospective Bot

Retrospective Bot is a Flask app built to run on AWS Lambda.

Set Up on Slack

Retrospective Bot uses two Slack integrations: Slash Commands for private communication between the bot and the user, and Incoming Webhooks for posting public messages.

Set up a Slash Command integration. There are three critical values that you need to set or save: Command is the command people on Slack will use to communicate with the bot. We use /retro. URL is the public URL where the bot will live; LEAVE THIS PAGE OPEN so that you can fill this in after you've deployed the application to AWS Lambda, as described below. Token is used to authenticate communication between Slack and the bot; save this value for when you're setting up the bot on AWS Lambda.

Set up an Incoming Webhooks integration. The first important values here is Post to Channel, which is a default channel where public messages from the bot will appear. This default is always overridden by the bot, but you do need to have one – we created a new channel called #retrospective-bot for this purpose. Save the value of Webhook URL; this is the URL that the bot will POST public messages to, and you'll need it when setting up Retrospective Bot on AWS Lambda.

Deploy on AWS Lambda

Paste the Token from the Slash Command integration into the SLACK_TOKEN field and the Webhook URL from the Incoming Webhooks integration into the SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL field. Copy that URL, paste it into the URL field of the Slash Command integration page on Slack, and save the integration there.

And now you're good to go! Open up Slack and type /retro help to start.

Setup

 

• Install docker and docker-compose.
• Checkout this code on your machine.
• Run Zappa to deploy this code as a AWS Lambda function: docker-compose run --rm deploy zappa deploy dev. For more info about how Zappa works check its documentation.
• Add a new webhook in Github. Enter the url of your freshly created AWS Lambda endpoint, use 'json' for the Content type, and select the individual event 'Issue Comment'.
• Get a personal auth token on Github, then add it as GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN to the AWS Lambda function environment variables to your local machine if you want to test this code locally.  

Lint and Test

If you want to modify this code:  

• To test the Flask endpoint of the AWS Lambda function locally:

docker-compose run --rm test bash
FLASK_APP=reviewable_to_slack.py flask run &
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST --data @github_notification_payload_example.json http://127.0.0.1:5000/handle_github_notification

• To run the linting and testing:

docker-compose run --rm test ./lint_and_test.sh`.

• To deploy your new code on AWS Lambda:

docker-compose run --rm deploy
zappa update dev
# To get the live debug logs:
zappa tail