VOIDBOT — Devlog #1
Migrating to Hack Club Nest
VOIDBOT started as a Python Slack bot hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. It uses Socket Mode, meaning it doesn’t need a public URL — it connects directly to Slack via a persistent WebSocket. To keep Hugging Face’s supervisor happy, I ran a lightweight HTTP health-check thread alongside the bot, tricking the platform into thinking a web server was running.
During re-certification for Stardance, my reviewer flagged that Hugging Face Spaces doesn’t run indefinitely and isn’t an approved hosting platform. The fix: migrate to Hack Club Nest, a free Linux container provided by Hack Club.
I applied for a Nest container, generated an SSH key pair with ssh-keygen, and submitted the public key during the application. Once approved, I SSHed into the container, installed git and Python dependencies, cloned the VOIDBOT repo, configured the Slack tokens via a .env file, and verified the bot connected successfully.
To keep it running 24/7 after closing the SSH session, I installed tmux and detached the bot process inside a named session. VOIDBOT is now live on Nest, accessible in the public #voidbot-demo channel on the Hack Club Slack.
Try it: join #voidbot-demo and run /vt-ping, /vt-about, or /vt-voidtune.