Simple bot that detects new Slack emoji added through https://my.slack.com/customize/emoji and notifies a channel about them. Intended to run on a schedule, such as every hour, using cron.

Emoji-bot uses the slack-ruby-client gem to easily interact with the Slack API. On initial run, the emoji.list method is called and the list of all emoji is saved in an emoji.txt file. Every subsequent time the script is run, it asks Slack for the emoji list again and compares the existing emoji and the new list. If any new emoji are found, the chat.postMessage method is called with a random response from responses.txt and the new emoji. Finally, the new list of emoji are saved in emoji.txt.

The simplest way to run is with docker, which will check every hour for new emoji in a container:

docker run -it -d \
  -e SLACK_API_TOKEN="$TOKEN" \
  -e SLACK_CHANNEL="#emojis" \
  -e SLACK_USERNAME="emoji-bot" \
  -e SLACK_ICON_EMOJI=":parrot:" \
  --name emoji-bot \
  dpca/slack-emoji-bot

You can see if the container is up by using docker ps, and check its logs with docker logs emoji-bot. Omit the -d option to run the docker container in the foreground for development purposes.

You can request a token for testing purposes from https://api.slack.com/docs/oauth-test-tokens but should use a bot token from https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot for a real deployment. Read more about bot users here: https://api.slack.com/bot-users

If not provided, SLACK_USERNAME defaults to "emoji-bot" and SLACK_ICON_EMOJI defaults to ":parrot:".

First, you need to set your SLACK_API_TOKEN and SLACK_CHANNEL to message in .env. Then, save initial emoji:

bundle install
./emoji-bot.rb --setup

./emoji-bot.rb

You can run the emoji-bot automatically by adding something like the following to your crontab (crontab -e):

0 * * * * cd /home/USER/slack-emoji-bot && /usr/local/bin/ruby emoji-bot.rb >> /home/USER/slack-emoji-bot/cronOutput.txt 2>&1