Slack bot that goes out and reads data from external page then posts? - slack-api

Question

I have an external website that has some dynamic data on it that refreshes regularly. I'd like to set up a Slack bot reaches out to that site (maybe by a curl or with screen scraping) and return the first line of data into a message in a channel.
I browsed some integrations and I haven't found anything that fits the bill quite yet. I don't have control over the external site to put a send to Slack button on it.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming the curl/scraping part works as intended, you should have no specific issue. When the user types either a slash command or a bot keyword, you can perform the scraping from your server then:
if it was a slash command, use a delayed response (you have up to 30min to respond, see documentation https://api.slack.com/slash-commands#responding_to_a_command)
If the request came from a bot, simply post the text in the channel as a standard message
It would help if you shared more details about the framework you use or even share your code

Answer 2

If you are writing your bot in Go, you are more than welcome to use my Slack Bot framework https://github.com/shomali11/slacker
You can easily create a bot that responds to mentions and direct messages then respond back.
For example:
package main
import (
"github.com/shomali11/slacker"
"log"
)
func main() {
bot := slacker.NewClient("<YOUR SLACK BOT TOKEN>")
bot.Command("ping", "Ping!", func(request *slacker.Request, response *slacker.Response) {
response.Reply("pong")
})
bot.Command("read <url>", "Read content of a URL", func(request *slacker.Request, response *slacker.Response) {
urlContent := readData(request.Param("url"))
response.Reply(urlContent)
})
err := bot.Listen()
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}
As for the readData method, reading data from external pages should be relatively straightforward in Go. Here is an example using gorequest:
request := gorequest.New()
response, body, errs := request.Get("http://example.com/").End()