Before deploying, consider using and sponsoring a free game bot service and not worrying about installation or maintenance.
Deploy slack-gamebot to Heroku and add a MongoLab or Compose MongoDB provider. You can use both free and paid tiers.
See this blog post.
If your bot servces one team, create a new bot integration on Slack and set SLACK_API_TOKEN from the bot integration settings on Slack. The first time you start the service it will automatically create a team using this token.
heroku config:add SLACK_API_TOKEN=...
Optional names for this bot.
heroku config:add GAMEBOT_ALIASES=":pong: pp"
Aliases can also be configured per-game. A default game will be created the first time the bot starts, you can update its aliases from a console.
game = Game.first
game.aliases << 'pp'
game.save!Slack-Gamebot replies with animated GIFs. While it's currently not necessary, you may need to set GIPHY_API_KEY in the future, see github.com/Giphy/GiphyAPI for details.
This defaults to http://localhost:5000 in development and https://www.playplay.io in production.
The root of your API location, used when displaying the API URL for teams when invoking set api.
The free service on playplay.io allows users to upgrade to a paid service and enable a number of premium features. The money is collected with Stripe, and requires two keys, a private key for creating subscriptions on the back-end, and a public key for tokenizing credit cards client-side.
If your bot is a service, like the one on playplay.io, register an aplication with Slack on https://api.slack.com and note the Slack client ID and secret. Create a game (currently console only).
heroku run script/console --app=...
2.2.1> Game.create!(name: 'pong', client_id: 'slack client id', client_secret: 'slack client secret', bot_name: 'pongbot', aliases: ['pp', 'pong'])
=> #<Game _id: 55c8f7da276eaa0003000000, ...>
This will allow you to create a team via POST /teams?game=pong&code=, where the code is obtained via Slack OAuth workflow. You can make a website to onboard teams, see playplay.io for an example. There's no authentication or authorization currently built-in.
MongoLab and MongoHQ ensure a system-level backup. You might find it handy to backup the data elsewhere occasionally. If you can run rake db:heroku:backup[app] locally as long as you can execute heroku config --app=... as well. This creates a .tar.gz file from a MongoDB database configured on the Heroku app application.