riz!
By
@rizz
- 2 Devlogs
- 2 Total hours
This bot isn't slacking off, it replies to messages 24/7!
Ship #2
so i improved many thing like the joke command and the readme and many other bugs
Ship #1
Building Friday Bot was a wild journey. The hardest part by far was debugging why the bot was completely silent when I typed commands in Slack. Tracking down missing socket tokens and fixing that frustrating path error in systemd where Node kept looking for an index file instead of my actual server file drove me crazy for a bit.
On the flip side, the most fun part was getting everything live on my Hack Club Nest server. Logging into the Linux terminal and realizing I could run a real backend app in the cloud felt amazing. Seeing the calculator command finally return a correct response in Slack after hours of tinkering was a huge relief and a ton of fun.
I learned a lot along the way. I now understand how Socket Mode works without needing public webhook URLs, how to manage background processes using systemd so applications stay online around the clock, and how Slack apps handle permissions behind the scenes. It felt awesome to take code from a local project to a fully running cloud server
Today was a wild ride building and deploying Friday Bot. The goal was to create a Slack bot that handles slash commands like math calculations and status updates while also backing it up with a clean Express API.Things did not go smoothly at first. Whenever I typed a command in Slack, it just gave me a frustrating error saying the app did not respond. I spent way too long digging into socket mode configurations. Turns out my app level token was missing the required connection scopes, and my local server was completely silent because nothing was actively listening down the websocket.Adding a global error handler to the code saved me. It finally surfaced what was breaking under the hood. Once I cleaned up the token permissions and wired up the Bolt app properly, testing the calculator command actually returned a correct result instead of timing out.After getting the code working locally, it was time to put it on the web. I decided to host it on my Hack Club Nest server. Logging into the Linux box via SSH felt like old school programming.Setting up the environment on the server took a few steps. I installed Node, cloned my github repository, manually created the environment file with all my private tokens, and tested it manually. Everything booted up on port 3000 just like it did on my local machine.To make sure the bot stays alive after I close the terminal, I configured a systemd service file. Now it runs as a background service with automatic restarts. Friday Bot is officially live and online around the clock.
