Slack Meetups

A Slack bot that randomly pairs users in a Slack channel for 1:1 meetups. Meet new, interesting people in your company, club, or group!

Features

• 💬 Requests a custom introduction for each person
• ❓ Asks availability each round, allowing people to opt in or out of being paired
• 🎲 Randomly pairs people to meet via direct message
• 🤝 Collects feedback on who actually met up
• 🏆 Generates leaderboards and graphs of pairings for each channel

It supports variable frequency and length for rounds of matching, multiple matching "pools" that can operate independently, it and has an admin interface to manage membership, pools, and matching rounds.

Tech stack

• Django running on Python 3.7+
• SQLite 3 (you can change databases if you need something more robust, but it's not a particularly database-intensive application)
• Celery running on RabbitMQ as an async task queue for sending messages

User guide for admins

Note: This section assumes an already-configured and deployed server. For setup instructions, see below.

Add people to a Slack channel

First, get a Slack channel to work with. The bot will automatically message all channel members when you start a new round, so the people in this channel should be at the least aware, and ideally willing to participate. You can use an existing Slack channel or create a new one, but for this reason you may want to have a dedicated channel for the meetup bot.

There is no limit to the number of members who can be in the channel. The more the merrier!

Once you have a channel with some members, you're ready to create a matching pool.

Create a pool

Log in to the admin interface at https://<whatever your base url is>/admin/. The login should look like this:

After logging in, you should see the admin dashboard:

Under the "Matcher" list to the right of "Pools", click the "Add" button. Fill out the info on the page:

• "Name": a human-readable descriptor for the pool, like “2020 interns”
• "Channel ID": Slack's unique identifier for the channel. You can find this by opening Slack in a web browser, navigating to the channel you want to use, and copying the ID from the URL. See screenshot below.
• "Channel name": The name of the Slack channel. This should match the channel name exactly as it appears in Slack.

Example: The Slack channel ID is the highlighted part of the URL.

Finally, click "Save". Your pool is created!

Start a round of matching

There are two steps to creating a round of matching: asking availability and actually doing the matching. It's often best to do both on Mondays: Ask for people's availability for the round Monday morning, and do the round matching a few hours later after people have had time to respond.

For people who are new to using the bot (which will be everyone on your first round), instead of being asked for availability, they'll be prompted to type a short intro about themselves. When they respond with this intro, they will automatically be marked as available for their first round.

Ask for availabilities/intros

Let's see what both scenarios look like by creating a round. Go back to the main page of the admin interface. Under the "Matcher" list to the right of "Rounds", click the "Add" button.

Select a pool and a start and end date. A week is usually good – start on a Monday and end on a Friday. You can set these to whatever you want though!

Click the "Save" button. When you do so, everyone in the pool (that is, everyone in the pool's Slack channel) will get a direct message. If they're a first-time user, they'll be asked for an introduction about themselves. Here's how that interaction looks:

Once they've provided their intro, they're automatically marked as available for their first round. If they never respond with an intro, they'll still appear in the admin interface under "People", but they won't be matched or messaged asking if they're available.

Here's the "People" admin list page:

For people who've already provided an intro, they'll get a message asking if they want to be matched in the upcoming round. Their response will update their "available" status:

Do the matching!

Once you've given people enough time to write their intro or update their availability, it's time to start the round! From the admin main page, under the "Matcher" list, click "Rounds". Select the round you created, and at the bottom right, click "Do round matching". People in the pool who've responded as available will be randomly paired up. The bot will create a group DM between the two people and introduce them to each other:

You can see who was matched by going to the admin interface, and under "Matcher" click "Matches". It's not advisable to change matches after they're made because the bot will not automatically re-message people. It's also just confusing for participants.

Find out who met up

When the current round is over and you're ready to start a new one, follow the same instructions above under "Start a round of matching". The bot will still solicit everyone's availability, but this time after each user RSVPs, the bot will check if this person met with someone before. If so, it will send a follow-up message asking if they met up with their previous match. Here's what that looks like:

From the admin interface, under "Matcher" you can click "Matches" to see a full list of matches. You can filter by round and "met" status to get stats on how many people met up from each round.

View and share the stats page

After you've completed a few rounds of pairing, you might want to take a look at the stats page. Stats pages are automatically generated for each pool and can be found at <your base url>/stats/<channel-name>. They display general numerical statistics about the pool, a leaderboard of who has met up with the most people, and a graph showing all pairings. Example screenshots below.

Leaderboard

Pairings graph, with one person and their pairings highlighted

Known limitations

• The bot's message content is a bit specific in places and may not match your use case. Luckily, all content is stored within matcher/messages.py so it's fairly easy to customize if you want to fork the repo.
• The bot doesn't respond to text queries, other than to set a person's intro. Aside from that, it will repond with a generic "Sorry, I don't know how to respond!" type of message unless an admin is configured in the ADMIN_SLACK_USER_ID environment variable (see "Configuring the web server" section below). If an admin is defined, they will get a DM with "unknown" queries to the bot and have ability to respond to them as the bot.
• Setting up automated, scheduled matching rounds must be done from the cron-jobs file. There is not an admin UI for doing so.
• On the admin side, there's not a ton of input validation, and there are no pool-specific admin permissions. The app mostly assumes that admins know what they're doing. If they do something wrong or unusual (like using a non-existent ID for a Slack channel, creating a matching round in the past, etc), unexpected behavior is likely to happen. That said, most of the error-prone tasks are in creating pools (generally an infrequent or one-time thing) and editing matches (which is inadvisable anyway). Using Django's built-in user groups, you can restrict admin users' ability to edit these models.

Setup instructions

Slack API

Create the app

1. Create a Slack app under your desired workspace at https://api.slack.com/apps/.
2. Under Features > App Home > Show Tabs, check the checkbox "Allow users to send Slash commands and messages from the messages tab".
3. Under Settings > Basic Information > Display Information, set your app name and description as desired. I recommend using the cute bot logo.

Enable interactivity

Come back to this section later if you don't have a server URL yet.

1. Under Settings > Basic Information > Building Apps for Slack > Add features and functionality, click Interactive Components.
2. Toggle Interactivity to ON.
3. Enter a base Request URL, appended with /slack/action/. This URL needs to be publicly accessible, so for local development I recommend using ngrok or localhost.run.
4. Save Changes.

Enable events

Come back to this section later if you don't have a server URL yet.

1. Under Settings > Basic Information > Building Apps for Slack > Add features and functionality, click Event Subscriptions.
2. Toggle Enable Events to ON.
3. Enter the same base Request URL as above, appended with /slack/message/.
4. Under Subscribe to bot events, click Add Bot User Event and add the following events:

• message.im
• app_mention

5. Save Changes.

Set up OAuth

1. Go to Settings > Basic Information > Building Apps for Slack > Add features and functionality and click Bots.
2. Click Review Scopes to Add.
3. Under Scopes > Bot Token Scopes, click Add an OAuth Scope.
4. Add the following scopes:

• users:read
• users:read.email
• users.profile:read
• channels:read
• groups:read
• im:read
• im:history
• im:write
• mpim:read
• mpim:history
• mpim:write
• channels:manage
• app_mentions:read
• groups:write
• chat:write

5. Under OAuth Tokens for Your Workspace, click Install to Workspace.
6. Review and confirm the installation.
7. You should now see your Bot User OAuth Token. This token allows the bot to access the Slack workspace. It usually starts with "xoxb-", and it corresponds to the SLACK_API_TOKEN value referenced in the "Configuring the web server" section below.
8. Copy it and store it securely.

Get the signing secret

1. Under Settings > Basic Information > App Credentials, Show the Signing Secret. This key allows the bot (the web server you will set up below) to verify that the incoming request is actually coming from Slack. It corresponds to the SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET value referenced below.
2. Copy it and store it securely.

Environment variable setup

1. In the top level of the repo, run cp .env.example .env
2. Edit the .env example to fill in environment variables, including:

• Django stuff:
  • SECRET_KEY: a long random string for Django's cryptography
  • DJANGO_SUPERUSER_USERNAME: username to log into the admin
  • DJANGO_SUPERUSER_EMAIL: your email address
  • DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD: password to log into the admin
• Slack stuff:
  • SLACK_API_TOKEN: a bot token to connect to Slack, usually starts with "xoxb-"
  • SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET: used to verify that requests are from Slack
  • ADMIN_SLACK_USER_ID: (optional) Slack user ID for the admin who will be messaged if the bot receives a message it doesn't know how to act on

Running with Docker (recommended)

1. Install Docker
2. Run docker compose up (add -d to run in the background)
3. Visit http://localhost:8000/admin/ and log in with the credentials you set in the .env file

Running without Docker

You can ignore this section if you're using the Docker-based setup.

Prerequisites

• Ensure you have Python 3.7+ installed
• Install RabbitMQ

Installation

1. create a virtualenv folder: mkdir meetups
2. install the virtualenv: python3 -m venv meetups
3. cd meetups, source bin/activate
4. clone repo into the virtualenv
5. cd [repo]
6. pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Configuring the web server

1. python manage.py collectstatic to move static files for serving
2. python manage.py makemigrations matcher to set up migrations to create the database tables
3. python manage.py migrate to create the database tables
4. python manage.py createsuperuser to create your user to log in to the admin
5. python manage.py runserver to start the server
6. Visit http://localhost:8000/admin/ and log in with the credentials you set in the .env file

Configuring the Celery task queue

In order to send Slack messages from the bot, you also need to run a Celery task queue. This queue allows the bot to send messages asyncronously and retry if sending fails, which can happen if there are network issues or the bot gets rate-limited by the Slack API.

After installing RabbitMQ (see Setup above), do the following:

1. Start the RabbitMQ broker. How to do this varies by OS and installation method; see the RabbitMQ docs.
2. In a separate terminal window, again source the virtualenv with the command source bin/activate (or whatever the path to the activate script is)
3. Start the Celery task queue: celery -A matcher.tasks worker --loglevel=info

Setup for production deployment

I recommend using Docker for production deployment, following similar instructions as above. In the .env file, make sure you also have DEBUG=False for security.

In production, you should run the app behind a proxy server. I recommend Nginx. Here's an example config:

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name yourdomain.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

Scheduled matching rounds

If you want to do recurring matching rounds in a Slack channel and don't want to have to manually log into the admin and press buttons to do so every time, follow these instructions:

1. After creating a matching pool (see the User Guide above), open the cron-jobs file at the top of the repo.
2. Uncomment the lines containing create_round (for automated round creation – asking availability), and do_round_matching (to make 1:1 matches after people have had time to respond).
3. Set the schedule on which you want each of these things to happen using cron syntax, such as 0 10 * * 1 for 10:00am (server time) every Monday.
4. Replace the example channel IDs (C07AA3ZH0Q5) with the one from your matching pool. You can also provide multiple channel IDs separated by spaces.
5. Save the file.
6. Rebuild and restart the Docker container.

rtm branch

Do you need to use the Slack Real-Time Messaging (RTM) API instead of the Events API? Check out the rtm branch. You will need to use the RTM API if you're inside a corporate intranet or firewall that won't allow you to receive events from Slack on a publicly accessible URL.

The RTM API doesn't support Slack's interactive components like action buttons, so they are replaced with having users just type a "yes"/"no" response to the bot.

On the rtm branch, there is a Node.js proxy server under rtmProxy/ that connects to the socket-based RTM API and forwards Slack events to the Django server as HTTP requests. To run it, you can modify the docker-compose.yml to add a Node service there, or run it manually:

1. Install Node.js
2. cd rtmProxy
3. npm install
4. npm start

---

This Slack bot is in no way endorsed by or affiliated with Slack Technologies or their product, Slack.