Databraid Slack API

Description

An Express server/router which serves as the backend for the Databraid Slack Widget. This is used in conjunction with the Databraid Slack SPA. It is built to run as a container within Docker.

The Databraid Slack API handles all interaction with Slack's Event API. It authenticates with Slack during an OAuth sign-in. It makes requests to the Slack Event API to fetch information about a Slack team's users and channels. It interfaces with a PostgreSQL database to store and retrieve data. It interfaces with Google's Natural Language Processor API to perform sentiment analysis on the channel's content. It is also responsible for setting up a web socket using socket.io and, once the Databraid Slack SPA connects with that socket, pushing new event and sentiment information to the client.

Usage

There are a number of things that need to be in place prior to having this server function correctly. You must:

• Have a Slack team to which you hold administrative privileges.
• Set up a Slack App at api.slack.com which listens for new events for that team and pushes these to the client. You will also need to verify the server with the Slack App using the servers /slack/events endpoint.
• Get a Google Account and license key for Google NLP API.
• If this is being run locally, you will need Docker installed.
• If this is being set up as a local development environment, you may also need to expose your localhost and port over https using a tool such as localtunnel or ngrok.

Once these are set up, you will need to do the following to run the API:

1. Create a .env file locally which will hold all of the variables needed to run:
   • GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS: The filepath to the service account file containing google's API credentials. (e.g. "./google-credentials/service-account.json")
   • SLACK_CLIENT_ID: The client ID found in the Basic Information section of the Slack App.
   • SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET: The client secret found in the Basic Information section of the Slack App.
   • SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN: The verification token found in the Basic Information section of the Slack App.
   • REDIRECT_URI: This is the URI on this API built to handle the OAuth redirect. It will be at <your_domain>/slack/auth/redirect
   • DB_HOST: Host for the PostgreSQL database instance being used
   • DB_PORT: 5432
   • DB_USERNAME: "databraid"
   • DB_PASSWORD: your password for the database
   • DB_NAME: name of the database being used
2. If this is local, start Docker.
3. In the slack-api directory, run npm install to get all the needed dependencies.
4. If this is local, start localtunnel or ngrok.
5. In a terminal window, navigate to your slack-api files and run npm start.
6. If you need to shutdown or restart the server, exit out of the running process and then run npm run down to stop the container.

Testing and linting can all be done respectively with:

npm test
npm run lint