Hey folks! Today, I'm going to share one of our code samples that will show you how to deploy a simple Slack bot. If you're looking to connect a cloud service to Slack to publish status updates, or something else like that, this should help you get started. We'll walk through a step-by-step process of writing a Go program using the github.com/slack-go/slack library to interact with the Slack API and easily deploy it using Defang.

Prerequisites​

Before we dive into the details, let's make sure you have everything you need to get started:

1. Install Defang CLI: Simplify your deployment process by installing the Defang CLI tool. Follow the instructions here to get it up and running quickly.

2. Slack API Token: Create a Slack App at https://api.slack.com/apps, granting it the necessary permissions, including the bot chat:write scope.

3. Install the app in your workspace: You'll need to install the app in your workspace for it to work. Click the "Install to Workspace" button in the Slack admin UI to do this. Mine says "Reinstall" because I've already installed it.

4. Copy the Bot User OAuth Access Token: This token will authenticate your Slackbot with the Slack API.

5. Invite the Bot to a Channel: To enable your Slackbot, invite it to the desired channel using the @<botname> command. In the screenshot below, my bot's name actually starts with the word invite, but if your bot is called mycoolbot you would invite it with @mycoolbot. This ensures your Slackbot has the required permissions to interact with the channel.

6. Clone the Sample Code: Clone the Defang repository and navigate to the samples/golang/slackbot directory. This directory contains the sample code for the Slackbot.

git clone https://github.com/defang-io/defang
cd defang/samples/golang/slackbot

Deployment Steps​

Now that we have everything set up, let's dive into the deployment process. Follow these steps to deploy your Slackbot effortlessly:

1. Set Up Secrets: Prioritize security by configuring environment variables as secrets. Use the Defang CLI's defang secret set command to set the SLACK_TOKEN and SLACK_CHANNEL_ID secrets. Replace your_slack_token and your_slack_channel_id with the respective values:

   defang secret set --name SLACK_TOKEN --value your_slack_token
   defang secret set --name SLACK_CHANNEL_ID --value your_slack_channel_id
   

2. Deploy the Slackbot: Use the Defang CLI's defang compose up command to deploy.

Usage​

With your Slackbot up and running, let's explore how to make the most of it. Simply send a POST request to the / endpoint with a JSON body containing the message you want to post to the Slack channel. Popular tools like cURL or Postman can help you send the request:

curl 'https://raphaeltm-bot--8080.prod1.defang.dev/' \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data-raw $'{"message":"This is your bot speaking. We\'ll be landing in 10 minutes. Please fasten your seatbelts."}'

Takeaways​

Congratulations! You've successfully deployed a Slackbot using Defang. If you deployed this as an internal service, you could use it to send status updates, alerts, or other important messages to your team. The possibilities are endless!

Defang is aiming to reduce the barriers to entry to cloud application development. With our tooling, we make it really easy to deploy multi-service containerized applications to your own cloud with a single command.

We want it to be easy for you to try Defang with as little friction as possible, though, so we have done the work so you can easily get started in a GitHub Codespaces environment, a GitPod Workspace, or even a local Dev Container.

Codespaces​

If you want to get started with Codespaces, you can just fork this repo. It comes with the Defang CLI pre-installed so you can start playing with it immediately. It's setup using the Defang CLI Dev Container Feature.

Dev Containers​

Dev Containers are a cool way to provision and configure development environments and share that configuration with other people you are working with. It's a spec that is supported by VS Code, Visual Studio, the JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ and PyCharm, DevPod and others.

GitPod​

GitPod is another Cloud IDE, a bit like GitHub Codespaces. If prefer GitPod, you can try Defang in a GitPod environment by using this repo.

As a student at University of British Columbia, new to the area of web development, I needed to develop and deploy a web application as a course project. It was already a huge challenge to complete the coding part. I could not believe that an even bigger challenge awaited. Picking the right platform and services is tough to start with. Do you know that AWS offers 200 different services? Lucky for me my professors’ instructed us to use ECS. Otherwise, I would have been totally lost.

Starting my project, honestly, it felt like I was hitting a brick wall. Diving into AWS with little to no clue was tough. Terms like "ECS clusters," "task definitions," and "IAM roles" were flying over my head. I was scared of messing something up, especially when it came to setting up things like ECR and load balancers.

It was overwhelming when all these unfamiliar concepts came at me at once. I searched them up on the internet and went straight to a top-rated YouTube tutorial. I spent an hour and a half going through the whole video series. Those tutorials, as helpful as they were, couldn't fully prepare me for the hands-on challenges of real-life implementation. It's one thing to follow along with a guide when everything goes right; it's another to adapt when things don't quite match up to the tutorial’s scenarios.

I ran into so many problems with configuring services. Sometimes it is caused by carelessly selecting the wrong options; sometimes it is due to the fact that I have no idea what the buttons mean; sometimes it is just a bug with my code. Those errors triple the time it took to deploy my project. It was indeed extremely frustrating.

Then I found Defang (www.defang.io), and it was like someone flipped a switch. Suddenly, all that complicated stuff became way easier. All I needed to do is to install Defang, build a compose.yaml file to describe my application, and run a single command - defang compose up. And Defang even has a Gen-AI assistant to help you write the code and compose file for your application. Defang automatically does all the heavy-lifting behind the scenes - configuring all the necessary services in a secure and optimal way, and automatically building and deploying my application components. No more late nights trying to figure out AWS docs or stressing about getting everything right. Deploying my Django Restaurant Homepage went from being my biggest worry to one of the smoothest parts of my project.

With Defang, I could chill a bit and actually enjoy working on my project, focusing on the cool parts without getting bogged down by all the technical stuff. It made cloud deployment feel doable and fun, even for someone like me who was pretty much a beginner. Give it a try yourself - go to www.defang.io to get started.

Try it yourself!

Sample Code: Restaurant Homepage

Defang Docs: Docs

Announcing the Defang Public Beta

A radically simpler way for developers to create, deploy, and manage cloud applications.

Ever since we shipped our Private Beta in the summer of 2023, we have been working with early adopters and listening to their feedback. While these early customers loved the ease with which they could create, deploy, and manage a cloud application, they had one big request - to deploy their applications to their own cloud (e.g. AWS) account. This was important to them for a number of reasons - to leverage their cloud credits, to enforce their IAM roles and security settings, to integrate new application components with their existing deployments, and more.

And so, today with our Public Beta, we are addressing this request. With today’s release of Defang BYOC (Bring-your-own-Cloud), you can now enjoy all the benefits of Defang and deploy applications to your own AWS account! Our Private Beta experience is still available as Defang Playground for you to quickly and easily prototype applications and deploy them to our hosted environment.

You can learn more about Defang here. Also check out our tutorials, samples, and FAQ to know more.

Try the Public Beta!

To try the Public Beta, please go to defang.io and click on Download to download the CLI and get started. We would love to have you kick the tires and give us your feedback! Once you sign up you’ll receive an invitation to our Slack support channel in email. You are also welcome to file Github issues here.

Stay Tuned for More

While the Public Beta is an important step forward, we have already heard requests for additional features - from support for additional cloud platforms such as Azure and GCP, to the ability to easily write cloud-agnostic applications while leveraging the best of each cloud platform. We are already working on these items and shall have more to share in the coming months - stay tuned!

Announcing the Private Beta for the Defang Opinionated Platform: Radically Simplifying and Cloud Application Development, Deployment, and Optimization

We're thrilled to announce the release of our Private Beta for the Defang Opinionated Platform (DOP). We started Defang because, as practitioners with experience in both building cloud apps and building cloud platforms, we were unhappy with the state of the art. It was, and remains, too difficult to develop, deploy, and optimize cloud applications. In architecting and building a cloud app, developers need to consider a variety of factors such as performance, scalability, cost, security, flexibility, simplicity, etc. At the same time, they face a bewildering array of choices - from app architecture to choice of cloud platforms and services, to configuration and deployment, CI-CD, security setting, etc. - in topics that they are not experts in. Clearly, we need a better way.

We realize that improving on this state of affairs is a long journey. Today, we are taking an initial step with the release of the Private Beta of the DOP. The DOP enables AI-assisted development, with the ability to specify a high-level prompt and get back an initial version of your cloud service code, which can then be refined further. The DOP simplifies CI-CD by automatically building and deploying new artifacts to your target environments when you push new code to your source repository, taking care of all dependency management and build tasks. And the DOP pre-provisions properly secured and configured staging and production environments for your application, optimized for security, scaling, and cost.

Try the Private Beta!

To try the Private Beta, please go to portal.defang.dev and register. We would love to have you kick the tires and give us your feedback! You can also check out our documentation, samples, and our Github repository.

Stay Tuned for More

While the Private Beta is a start, we have already heard requests for additional features from some of our early adopters and have a lot more in the pipeline! Top of the list is the ability to bring your own cloud accounts (AWS, Azure, GCP). Another frequent request is the ability to access a variety of compute and storage services native to the underlying platform while still maintaining app portability. And we also hear about the need to be able to monitor and optimize an app once deployed. We are already working on all these items and hope to have more to share in the coming months - stay tuned!