Slack Poker Bot 
A bot that turns Slack into a legitimate Texas Hold'em client. Start a game in any channel or private group with 2-10 players. PokerBot will deal hands, direct message players with their hole cards, query players for their action, determine the winning hand, and handle the pot.
See it in action.
Getting Started
- Create a new bot integration
- Follow the steps to deploy the bot to Heroku or run it locally
- Once the bot is running, start a game with:
@<your-bot-name>: deal
One-Click Heroku
Click this button:
Manual Heroku
- Install Heroku toolbelt
- Create a new bot integration (as above)
heroku createheroku config:set SLACK_POKER_BOT_TOKEN=[Your API token]git push heroku master
To Run Locally
- Create a
token.txtfile and paste your API token there npm installnode src/main.js
Directions
- To start a game,
@<your-bot-name>: deal. - To end a game,
@<your-bot-name>: quit game. The game will end once the current hand finishes.
Note that any player can end a game at any time with this command, so Be Honorable™. - To configure some bot options,
@<your-bot-name>: config <name-of-option>=<value>. The supported options are:
timeout: Sets the duration (in seconds) before a player times out.
Set to 0 to specify no timeout.
So, to start a game without any player timeout, say:
@<your-bot-name>: config timeout=0
@<your-bot-name>: deal
Check the open issues for some planned enhancements.
AI Players
Although this client was built for managing human players in a Slack channel, it has some support for AI players. To add a bot player:
- Add a bot class under the
ai/folder - Implement
getAction, which is called whenever it is the bot's turn - Modify the
addBotPlayersmethod insrc/bot.jsto add your bot to every game
Test All The Things
To run tests, simply do:
gulp
The tests produce legible output that matches what users in Slack would see. This is the same test suite that is run on each pull request. This is very helpful when diagnosing a logic bug:
Dependencies
-
NodeJS Slack Client
node-slack-clientabstracts the basics of a Slack bot, including authentication, getting messages from players, and posting messages or attachments to the channel. -
RxJS
The majority of this client is written usingRxJS. It simplifies many of the complex player polling interactions, that would otherwise be Death By Timers, into very legible code. -
Imgur / Lightweight Image Processor
Each card is a separate image, and board images are created on the fly by pasting several cards onto a single canvas (with the help oflwip). The resulting image is than uploaded toimgur, which gives us a single URL that can be passed as an attachment to the Slack API. This route was chosen to avoid uploading 318,505,200 images to the cloud, and allows us to modify the card assets easily. -
Poker Evaluator
poker-evaluatoris used for evaluating the winning hand when it comes time to show down. Here it has been extended to calculate the best 5-card hand from any 7-card hand. -
MochaJS
Most of the tricky client logic is backed up by tests, which were written usingMochaJS.