Do you know what happens when you type/giphy sorry no can do  in one of your Slack channels? A funny gif pops up, so instead of explaining to your teammates why a particular task will require a bit more work than anticipated, you let them know by sending this:

That is, in short, what a Slack bot does.

It’s been some time since I became interested in Elixir and I finally decided to do something fun with it on my way to mastering it. I went with creating a small Slack bot with slash commands and I’ll show you how to make your own in a short tutorial I compiled below.

Let’s get to it.

One caveat before we start—this tutorial is just a proof of concept as I’ve never either:

1. used the Slack API before,
2. deployed anything with Elixir.

So, how to build a Slack bot step by step? Well, we want to:

1. create a simple REST API with Elixir to accept commands from Slack,
2. deploy it,
3. create a Slack app with a slash command communicating with the Elixir API,
4. introduce the app to the team and test the connection.

#elixir #slack bot #elixir phoenix #development