My first slack bot!
- 4 Devlogs
- 3 Total hours
This bot isn't slacking off, it replies to messages 24/7!
/zenith-mars, /zenith-spacex and a couple others just stopped responding and i couldnt figure out why for a bit.
turns out it wasnt my code at all. the SpaceX API got archived on GitHub back on June 6th, its basically dead now. NASA’s Mars Photos endpoint was down too, separate issue entirely. so i just pulled both out.
replaced them with two new commands that use NASA’s APIs that are actually still alive:
/zenith-earth — latest photo of Earth from the EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite
/zenith-neo-week — biggest asteroid passing by Earth this week
one thing to know — dont fire commands back to back without waiting for a reply first, you’ll hit NASA’s rate limit and the second one fails silently. took me way too long to realize this was also why APOD was acting weird earlier, not an actual bug.
Ship #1
💀 Cursed
ok so yesterday i deployed the bot and was hyped to test it… and half the commands just didn’t work. spent today figuring out why.
what was broken?
turns out the server still had the old code even though i pushed to GitHub. git pull was failing quietly because of file conflicts so nothing actually updated. force reset it and it finally synced. then i hit another wall — Hack Club Nest blocks outbound HTTPS. every NASA and SpaceX API call was dying with SSL error 525. the commands that used plain HTTP like /zenith-iss worked perfectly the whole time, i just didn’t notice. switched all the URLs from https:// to http:// and everything came back to life.
NASA API commands working now:
/zenith-apod — NASA astronomy picture of the day
/zenith-mars — latest Mars rover photo
/zenith-asteroids` — near Earth asteroids today
/zenith-spacex — latest SpaceX launch info
/zenith-nextlaunch — next upcoming launch + countdown
/zenith-space-report — quick space summary
daily dashboard added:
a morning digest that posts to #space-alerts every day at 8am. hits NASA, SpaceX, and Open Notify all at once and wraps it into one message — photo of the day, latest launch, and how many people are floating in space right now. pretty happy with how it turned out. —
so i wanted to build something that combined two things i actually care about — coding and space. ended up making a slack bot called Zenith that pulls live data from NASA and SpaceX through slash commands.
commands i built
/zenith-ping — check if bot is alive
/zenith-apod — NASA astronomy picture of the day
/zenith-iss — live ISS location with google maps link
/zenith-spacex — latest SpaceX launch info
/zenith-nextlaunch — next upcoming launch + countdown
/zenith-mars — latest Mars rover photo
/zenith-astronauts — who is in space right now
/zenith-asteroids — near Earth asteroids today
/zenith-space-report — quick space summary
/zenith-planet [name] — facts about any planet
/zenith-help — show all commands
Started working on my slack bot called zenith which would tell u about some fun facts about space
