Yes! I recommend using the Howdy AI Botkit which makes it very easy to create a Slack bot. Here's a simple 'hello world' bot:

var Botkit = require('botkit')
var controller = Botkit.slackbot()

controller.spawn({
  token: <my_slack_bot_token>,
}).startRTM()

controller.hears(
  'hello', ['direct_message', 'direct_mention', 'mention'],
  function (bot, message) {
    bot.reply(message, 'Hello world!')
  }
)

As soon as you run the following with node, you can send 'hello' as a DM to the bot and it'll reply with 'Hello world!'.

If you want to deploy the bot, I recommend using now or Heroku. It's free, very easy to setup and it'll make your bot always available!

You can start with hubot, githubs robot :https://hubot.github.com/

which already has some slack stuff built

If you're building a Slack bot, enter the AWS competition while you're at it: aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/enter-the-aws-serverless…

It maybe not 100% what you are looking for, but I found this to be a good read. chrisdermody.com/slack-custom-slash-command-check…

How to Build a Slack Chatbot In Node.js using Botkit codequs.com/p/B1FzjMuF/how-to-build-a-slack-chatb…