A slack BOT that simply reminds Birthdays the funny way with animated random Giphy GIFs... for free ;-p

The goal of this project is to make a "BOT" that wishes happy birthday, on a dedicated channel.

NB : As integration is made thanks to a Webhook, you don't have to add an app to your Slack Team... good for people who are using free plans on Slack.

To make this integration operational, all you need is :

• A slack Webhook url dedicated to the birthdays channel (private or public)
• A Giphy API token
• A place to run your daily Job (Travis cron jobs is a good place to do that so all your stuff is in the cloud)...but you can run it wherever you like
• A csv file that contains birthdays data (please take a look at data/birthdays.csv to get a running example)
• A maven runtime (to make things easier to run ...)

All of these items are available for free.

It's all in data/birthdays.csv :

• username and dob are mandatory,
• username must be unique
• dob is in format YYYY-MM-DD

If your are using default csv file (data/birthdays.csv), just run :

mvn exec:java -DgiphyApiKey=YOUR_GIPHY_API_KEY -DslackWebhookUrl=YOUR_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL

If you want to use a custom csv file use the fully qualified command line :

mvn exec:java -DcsvFileName=CSV_FILENAME_PATH -DgiphyApiKey=YOUR_GIPHY_API_KEY -DslackWebhookUrl=YOUR_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL

First, install the Incoming WebHooks app : https://slack.com/apps/A0F7XDUAZ-incoming-webhooks Configure it to target the birthdays channel Keep the url and keep it secret

You can set in up localy on your workstation, on a server but...the best way is to deploy i ton the cloud... and Travis CI can help, see dedicated section for that.

To better manage birthdays greetings, you can create a dedicated branch and cron job only on that branch ;-p ...hence you are ready to perform PR on the project.

Take care to schedule cron in the middle of the morning to get the best effect : it's muc more fun to get a live slack than to discover on when you arrive at the office : nothing beats the Slack "tac tac" with a punching GIF !

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/birthdays-bots-slack-travis-ci-cron-jobs-all-free-fun-adrien-sales/

• Thanks to Gabriel Pedro for his very efficient slack-webhook library, and very kind support on my features requests
• Thanks to Mathias Markl for his Giphy4J Giphy lib