I built GalaxyBot, an interactive 24/7 Slack bot for the Hack Club workspace using Node.js, @slack/bolt, and Slack Socket Mode.
What was challenging:
Figuring out the 24/7 cloud hosting. I originally planned to host it on Nest, but with queues backed up, I switched to Render. Because Socket Mode doesn’t require public webhook endpoints, Render’s free tier kept going to sleep after 15 minutes. To fix this, I built a lightweight HTTP health-check server alongside Bolt and set up keep-alive monitoring so it never disconnects.
What I’m proud of:
Getting the bot completely independent from my local machine so it stays alive 24/7 in Hack Club Slack, with instant response times across all 5 slash commands.
How to test it in Slack:
Run any of these commands in any channel or DM:
/dh-ping — Checks bot responsiveness and live timestamp
/dh-dice [sides] — Rolls a custom die (try /dh-dice 20)
