At Les-Tilleuls.coop, we use Slack to centralize our communications and notifications. And, as the maintainers of the API Platform framework, we also do our best to help the community on StackOverflow when we have some free time. Until recently we were just checking periodically the StackOverflow website for new questions. But because all our notifications (GitHub, Travis, Twitter…) except the one from StackOverflow were centralized on Slack, it wasn’t optimal.

So I created a tiny Slack bot (just 150 LOC) to monitor StackOverflow (or any other site from the StackExchange galaxy) and automatically post new questions in dedicated Slack channels.

This bot is written in Go, the source code (MIT licensed) as well as binaries are available on GitHub. A Docker image is also available to easily run the daemon locally or on your servers.

To install the bot, start by registering a new Slack bot, the run the daemon. For instance, using Docker:

docker run -e DEBUG=1 -e SLACK_API_TOKEN=<your-API-token> -e TAG_TO_CHANNEL='{"stackoverflow-tag": "slack-channel"}' dunglas/stack2slack

You can monitor as many SO tags as you want, and map and choose in which Slack channel questions must be posted.

Last but not least, if you rely on Kubernetes to manage your servers (or, as we do, use Google Container Engine), you can install Stack to Slack in a single command thanks to the provided Helm chart:

1. Clone the Git repository: git clone git@github.com:dunglas/stack2slack.git
2. Install the provided chart: helm install  --set slackApiToken=<your-API-token>  --set tagToChannel.stackExchangeTag=slackChannel  ./chart/stack2slack

If you like this bot, give it a star on GitHub. If you’re looking for skilled Go developers, or bot and API experts, drop us a mail!