[TBA]: TBA to Slack integration

[mikhail]

This is so cool. Thanks for responses guys! I went ahead and created an account on Google App Engine for myself. They gave me 60 days of free trial - plenty for this season. Then we will see. Now I'm thinking what programming language to use. I'd guess following TBA it would be Python, right? Shall we create a project on GitHub? Of course it must be open source, not a tiny doubt about that.

[joelg236]

Originally Posted by mikhail

This is so cool. Thanks for responses guys! I went ahead and created an account on Google App Engine for myself. They gave me 60 days of free trial - plenty for this season. Then we will see. Now I'm thinking what programming language to use. I'd guess following TBA it would be Python, right? Shall we create a project on GitHub? Of course it must be open source, not a tiny doubt about that.

Can I suggest a simple nodejs app that ingests TBA through this and serves slack JSON?

example

[mikhail]

Originally Posted by joelg236

Can I suggest a simple nodejs app that ingests TBA through this and serves slack JSON?

example

That's a wonderful library for polling TBA with GET requests. Must be a really powerful tool to run in a browser. What I was thinking of was a library to receive and parse POST requests from TBA so then the data could be recomposed into another POST and sent to Slack's webhook.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by mikhail

This is so cool. Thanks for responses guys! I went ahead and created an account on Google App Engine for myself. They gave me 60 days of free trial - plenty for this season. Then we will see. Now I'm thinking what programming language to use. I'd guess following TBA it would be Python, right? Shall we create a project on GitHub? Of course it must be open source, not a tiny doubt about that.

App Engine actually has a free tier, and you shouldn't need any more resources that that. Python works nicely on App Engine, so that's a perfectly fine choice (other GAE choices are Java, Go, and PHP)

Originally Posted by joelg236

Can I suggest a simple nodejs app that ingests TBA through this and serves slack JSON?

example

I'm not sure that library works if webhooks are used. The server wouldn't actually poll the TBA API, the flow would go something like this:

TBA ---(webhook)---> GAE (process, format) -----(Slack Message)---> Slack

[joelg236]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

App Engine actually has a free tier, and you shouldn't need any more resources that that. Python works nicely on App Engine, so that's a perfectly fine choice (other GAE choices are Java, Go, and PHP)



I'm not sure that library works if webhooks are used. The server wouldn't actually poll the TBA API, the flow would go something like this:

TBA ---(webhook)---> GAE (process, format) -----(Slack Message)---> Slack

You're totally right, I had it mixed up in my head. Makes sense.

[mikhail]

Update:
I finally succeeded connecting the two webhooks: from TBA to Slack. Yay! It's a -nasty hack- convoluted Python script running on Google Apps. So far it is very simplistic, basically just stripping JSON formatting for a couple of message types. I can't open-source it yet because all the URLs and secrets are hard coded into the script. I'll see how it works this upcoming weekend then will try to rewrite it in a more open-source-able form (after I'm done with my taxes as well). Stay tuned.

[mikhail]

Alright. Sorry for the delay, our team 3130 happened to win its second regional and had to go to the world champs. So all our resources were taken by the preps. Now as the competitions season is over I managed to scratch some time to publish our code onto GitHub. Here it is.

https://github.com/team3130/TBA-push-to-Slack/

That's a very basic example we tested in our Slack team. So far only "Upcoming Match" and "Match Score" notifications are implemented. And even those are very basic.

I'd love to hear suggestions how to make the project more collaborative so others could contribute. For the starters the major conflict I already can see would be that if this project grows further everyone will want their own formatting for messages. For the meantime I have no idea how to handle that. Please chime in.