Welcome to GoogleAppScript's Advent of Code Bot 👋

A Google App Script-based bot to manage advent-of-code Slack interactions

Installation instructions

Installation pre-requisites

• npm@3+
• A Google account
• Being administrator of your Slack channel (or knowing the admin as you will have to register the bot on it)
• This repository being cloned somewhere on your filesystem

Slack Bot Deployment

• cd to advent-of-code-slack-bot/ directory then run npm install on it

• Authenticate with clasp (google app script CLI) with npx clasp login (follow instructions)
  Note: clasp is a CLI to manage your Google App Scripts, and it's powered by Google (more infos here)

• Enable app script API here : https://script.google.com/home/usersettings

• Run npx clasp create --type api : a new google app script should be created under your google account. Publish keys for this script are going to be set into a .clasp.json private file : ⚠️ don't commit this file otherwise people will have access to your script !

• Run npx clasp push (or npx clasp push --watch if you want to edit/auto-deploy some changes made to the script)

  • Manifest file has been updated. Do you want to push and overwrite? => Answer "Yes" here Files are going to be compiled and pushed into your Google App Script.

• Run npx clasp deploy : a new version of your API is going to be made available on the internet

• Open your app script by running npx clasp open

  • Once opened, click on the "play" button in order to try to execute doPost function
  • By executing this, you should have an Authorization required popup : examine and grant authorizations to your current google account Note that if you get a "This application has not been validated (yet) by Google" error, click on Advanced parameters and proceed to the page (unsecure content)
  • There may have some errors executing doPost : don't worry that's expected (purpose was only to grant authorization to your user)
  • Open the Publish > Deploy as web app menu
  • In the popup, copy Current Web app URL : this is going to be your HTTP entrypoint for the Bot
    ⚠️ Avoid sharing this URL too widely, as anyone having access to this URL will be able to control the Bot and cheat :-)
  • Open File > Project Properties and select the Script Properties tab then create following properties / values :

  Property name	Value	Meaning
  LOG_ENABLED	true	This can be helpful to see logs, particularly at the beginning
  SLACK_CHALLENGE_ACTIVATED	true	Put this to true in order to allow Slack bot challenge
  ADVENT_OF_CODE_PRIVATE_LEADERBOARD_CODE		Use your advent of code private leaderboard code (integer) here
  ADVENT_OF_CODE_SESSION_COOKIE		Introspect queries made to advent of code to extract your session cookie value (in headers) and put it here

Slack instance configuration

• As a Slack administrator, open your Slack App page here
• Click on Create New App button to create a new Application
• Fill App Creation popup and reference the Slack Workspace
• Once done, and from Basic Information screen, open the Event subscriptions configuration page
• Activate events and paster Google App Script's Slack Bot URL you copied previously :
  • Wait for Google App Script challenge verification : if there is a failure, review Google App Script's SLACK_CHALLENGE_ACTIVATED project property to ensure this is valued to true and verify that GAS execution authorization has been granted.
  • Declare 1 bot events described in screenshot above : message.channels
  • Don't forget to save changes
• Once done, navigate to OAuth & Permissions section
  
  • In Scopes section, there should already be channels:history ; Add channels:join and chat:write
  • Once done, click on Install App to Workspace button on top of the screen, and validate permissions configured previously
  • Copy generated Bot User OAuth Access Token ...
  • ... and paste it into Google App Script's SLACK_ACCESS_TOKEN Project Properties. At the same time, disable SLACK_CHALLENGE_ACTIVATED flag.

Spreadsheet config & DB creation

• Move to the slack-sheet/ directory then run npm install on it
• Run npx clasp create --type sheets : a new google spreadsheet & app script should be created under your google account.
  • Copy generated google spreadsheet id ...
  • ... and paste it into the GAS SPREADSHEET_ID project property
  • Open Google spreadsheet based on the created URL : this will be useful in next steps as we're going to fill this spreadsheet with some data.
• Run npx clasp push (or npx clasp push --watch if you want to edit/auto-deploy some changes made to the script)
  • Manifest file has been updated. Do you want to push and overwrite? => Answer "Yes" here Files are going to be compiled and pushed into your Google App Script.
• In the spreadsheet, put following formula in a cell : =SAY_HELLO() : this will call code defined into your main/index.ts typescript file and can be useful if you would have to generate complex data into your spreadsheet.

Slack channel configuration

• Open Slack and invite the bot into one of your channels (prefer to choose a testing channel to begin with) : /invite @<bot_name>
• Channel help can be displayed by saying !help