How to create a custom slash command for Slack.

Want to save yourself hours of time in boring admin tasks so you can concentrate on your real job? 

Did you know you can use Slack as a command hub from which to control external services and systems? 

You can use this powerful functionality for a wide range of things, from initiating an action in your project management system to kicking off an automated email campaign. 

This course specifically will teach you how to create a custom slash command for Slack.

For example, you can setup a slash command that looks like

/bill 2.8 fixed jumpy header

that will automatically add that billed time (2.8 hours) with that task description (fixed jumpy header) against a client in your accountancy system. Slack sends the text entered together with the channel name it was sent from, so your script could match the channel name to your client's name in your accountancy package.

Super simple. Super clean. Super powerful.

Course Structure

The course is made up of a series of step-by-step screencasts of the course creator creating a slash command. We'll start from scratch to give you a very clear understanding of the development process and workflow for creating a custom slash command.

There is about an hour's worth of video content broken up into 14 discrete sections, making it very easy to complete the course at your own pace.

What We'll Build Exactly

We'll create a weather slash command.

• /weather <city>

This will allow someone to type something like /weather Cape Town which will display the weather for that city within Slack. This is a simple script, but will give you the basic framework on how to have a slash command call a server that calls an external service, perform any action and return some data to Slack.

An Overview of the Workflow We Will Build:

1. Setup a Node.js server that does something (like calls another API based on the parameters passed in by Slack) and returns some JSON data back to Slack.
2. Configure a custom slash command for a Slack account: what the slash command is to be called, what address to post to (the above Node.js server).

Skills You'll Learn

• Build on your experience of Javascript and learn new features of the next version: ECMAScript 2015 (ES6)
• You'll set up a Node.js server with Express on DigitalOcean.

I look forward to helping you automate a lot of those repetitive tasks you normally perform in your business!

Note: This course is not created by, affiliated with, or supported by Slack Technologies, Inc.