🤖 Advanced Slackbot with n8n

Use case

Slackbots are super powerful. At n8n, we have been using them to get a lot done.. But it can become hard to manage and maintain many different operations that a workflow can do.

This is the base workflow we use for our most powerful internal Slackbots. They handle a lot from running e2e tests for Github branch to deleting a user. By splitting the workflow into many subworkflows, we are able to handle each command seperately, making it easier to debug as well as support new usecases.

In this template, you can find eveything to setup your own Slackbot (and I made it simple, there's only one node to configure 😉). After that, you need to build your commands directly.

This bot can create a new thread on an alerts channel and respond there.

Or reply directly to the user.

It responds for help request to return a help page.

It automatically handles unknown commands.

It also supports flags and environment variables. For example /cloudbot-test info mutasem --full-info -e env=prod would give you the following info, when calling subworkflow.

How to setup

1. Add Slack command and point it up to the webhook. For example.

2. Add the following to the Set config node

• alerts_channel with alerts channel to start threads on
• instance_url with this instance url to make it easy to debug
• slack_token with slack bot token to validate request
• slack_secret_signature with slack secret signature to validate request
• help_docs_url with help url to help users understand the commands

3. Build other workflows to call and add them to commands in Set Config. Each command must be mapped to a workflow id with an Execute Workflow Trigger node
4. Activate workflow 🚀

How to adjust

1. Add your own commands.
2. Depending on your need, you might need to lock down who can call this.