Building Slack Bots

Slash commands

Commands that begin with a slash (/) are commands that can be used from anywhere within the Slack client. You are probably already familiar with the more common ones implemented by Slack themselves. For instance, use the topic command:

/topic Sloths are great

This will set the channel's topic to "Sloths are great." Like with incoming and outgoing webhooks, Slack allows teams to configure their own custom slash commands. To demonstrate their use, we'll build a bot that uses the popular computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/). The end goal is a bot that returns the results from the query submitted via the slash command.

Unlike webhooks, slash commands can only send data included with the command, so ...