Creating a Basic Slack Bot for Airtable Data Retrieval

I want to create a straightforward Slack bot that can fetch information from my Airtable database. The concept is pretty simple - when someone types a search term in Slack, the bot should look for that value in column A of my Airtable base and return the corresponding value from column B.

For example, if I have a glossary where column A contains terms and column B has definitions, I want to be able to search for a term and get back its definition. I’m also thinking a slash command like /lookup [term] would work well for this.

I don’t need any fancy AI or natural language processing right now, just basic string matching. Has anyone built something similar before? I’m looking for guidance on how to set up the connection between Slack and Airtable, and what’s the best approach to handle the data lookup.

Any tips or code examples would be really helpful. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!

i made a bot like that a while back! just link ur slack app to airtable’s api, set up a slash command that calls ur server, and then query airtable for the data. handle empty results too, or it might crash. hope that helps!