How to build a Slack bot in Node.js and deploy it to AWS

Slack apps are great as small, hobby projects. They can also be used to improve productivity in a business. Or just for fun. In this guide I’ll take you through how to build an app for Slack and deploy it to AWS using Terraform and CircleCI.

This template repo includes Terraform configuration to deploy the app to AWS API Gateway with an, optional, custom domain. I used Terraform rather than AWS SAM or the Serverless Framework because I already use Terraform to manage to my own AWS resources so it made sense to stick with it here. It also means that I can easily change my deployment process to create a Docker image and deploy to AWS ECS if I want to later on.

CircleCI configuration is also included for deploying a new version of the app to AWS Lambda. The way this config is setup allows the app to be deployed to a development AWS account when commits are pushed to master, and then deploy to a diferent, production, account when a release is tagged.

Slack apps can be configured to work with a single workspace, or be available for distribution. The template I’ve created supports both approaches so an app can initially be created for a single workspace during development but then easily updated to support distribution. This guide will start off by showing how to build an app for a single workspace and then make it available for others to install.

Now, let’s get started.

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