This is a sample repository used to integrate and explore the slack events API. The main purpose of this experiment is to build a user directory capable of being in sync with changes to a user in a slack workspace. If a user is added to the workspace, our directory should have the ability to show that user in our client. When a user edits his/her profile, that change needs to be captured by our server and the change needs to be displayed in our interface...
To view the live demo
The server portion of this project has a single responsibility: to keep track of the users in a slack workspace. The serverless API will listen to the events sent over by the slack API and based on the type of event it will manage users. The API Gateway will receive a request from slack and it will route it to a lambda function. In the serverless domain, if there are no requests, there's no infrastructure running. Behind the scenes AWS manages the infrastructure, for practical purposes, no requests, means our API handler is not actively working. This has several advantages including scalability out of the box. Infrastructure as code is easy to adopt and the costs of running a serverless API make this technology a very viable approach.
The persistence store selected for this project is the no-sql db dynamo. The main reason to select this database is the fact that 1. it plays well with the serverless mentality. 2. It integrates seamlessly with a lambda function 3. In order to keep track of the users in a workspace, we can store the json representation received by slack as an entry in the table. No additional fields or overhead required. Last but not least, the scalable capabilities of dynamo are incredible.
Last but most definitely not least! This example uses two projects dear to my heart: juniper and minik. Juniper is an open source project I built in order to effectively create the artifacts that AWS lambda functions depend on. You can see where and how it is used in the Makefile. Minik is a micro web framework I developed out of the frustration of working with the existing frameworks at the time. Minik follows a very minimalistic approach, very similar mentality to python's flask, but for the serverless world.
The server portion of this project can be used as a small blueprint on how to build a serverless project from scratch.
For the client portion, we see a very minimal approach as well. Using vuejs and the argon theme, we can see a list of the users in the selected slack workspace. In terms of architecture, the UI is as lean as it comes, with only a single view and two or three components to show the users that come back from the users API.
Hosting using S3 and cloud front link