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.
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.
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', botname: '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.