Deploying Python based Slackbot to Heroku
I decided to create this guide, because Heroku deployments aren’t always as intuitive as we expect them to be.
Getting Setup
- For this guide i forked a popular python based slackbot
- Added my own custom responses, i’ll skip this section as lins README is self explanatory
- So now your ready to deploy your bot so its a standable entity, heroku is perfect for this because deployment is easy & its free.99
Procfile
A Procfile contains a number of process type declarations, each on a new line. Each process type is a declaration of a command that is executed when a dyno of that process type is started.
Create a Procfile:
web: python run.py
Heroku
Ensure you have a Heroku account and installed their command line tools
heroku update
heroku login
Now its time to create/connect to your heroku app and configure your remote url.
If you don’t have an existing app:
heroku create
else:
heroku git:remote -a <app-name>
Visit your Heroku Dashboard for your app and ensure you have set the SLACKBOT_API_TOKEN environment variable.
Now that you have your remote url setup:
git push heroku <branch_name>
heroku ps:scale web=1
You will see this error when you visit your heroku URL. This is expected because this is a bot…. not a website so there is no index.html on port 80 ;)
Test your bot on slack!
