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!