// the find
scrapinghub/slackbot
A chat bot for Slack (https://slack.com).
A Slack bot framework built on the RTM (Real Time Messaging) API, letting you define message handlers with simple decorators. It's aimed at teams that want to write internal bots with minimal boilerplate. Predates the modern Slack Bolt SDK by several years.
The decorator pattern for registering handlers (@respond_to, @listen_to) is genuinely clean — regex capture groups map directly to function parameters. Concurrent message handling is built in via a thread pool, not bolted on. The functional test suite actually spins up a real Slack connection, which is more honest than most bot frameworks. Error routing to a channel via ERRORS_TO is a small but practical ops feature.
The RTM API it depends on is deprecated — Slack shut down RTM for new apps in 2021 and it's on life support for legacy ones. Last commit was March 2023, no active maintenance. If you're starting a new bot today, you'd use Slack's official Bolt for Python SDK instead. The settings system (a plain Python module called slackbot_settings.py on the import path) is an unusual pattern that will confuse anyone not familiar with it and makes testing configuration awkward.