Slack Text Avatar Bot Script Thing

Recently I've enjoyed having an avatar in Slack that's just word art. Pretty simple:

But I hate having to make them over and over again. So why not have a script that does it? A bot, maybe?

This script takes a bunch of potential words to use, and picks one at random, and makes an avatar, and sends it to Slack.

Installation

Make sure you have Node.js 4.x or above installed.

This uses node-canvas to do the fancy drawing, so you have to install that first: check out the node canvas docs.

Now clone this repo and copy config.sample.js to config.js and edit it as you see fit.

Note that technically you don't need to integrate with Slack at all... you can just set post_to_slack: false and this script will just save your avatar locally as text_avatar.png and you can manually upload it to Slack. Whatever, it's cool.

The most important bits of the config are:

• potential_texts -- an array of arrays, each sub-array containing the words to use per line. Check out the examples.
• which_font_file -- a path to an actual .ttf file with the font you want to use to render the text. I love Lato Black Italic.
• slack_api_token -- if you want to run this as a cron job or something and auto-update your Slack avatar, you gotta put your user's API key here.

Usage

Now that you have everything installed and your config.js file filled out, time to use it. Open up a shell/terminal, go to this folder, and:

$> node bot.js

That's it. You should see some helpful messages in your terminal window. You should also see text_avatar.png saved.

Run it over and over again to try out random words. See how it feels.

Also, if you want to manually specify a word, you can supply it directly:

$> node bot.js wat

or two words, each will be on a new line:

$> node bot.js lol wat

To do list

Some neat things to do...

• Better Slack support. It's lazy right now.
• wtf is up with having to use curl? can't get request or https libs to work.
• More flexible font rendering options; it's really lazy right now.
• Support for manually entering a word/lines into the command line, i.e. node bot.js lol to make a lol avatar