Botarium

A local Slack bot development simulator. Build, test, and debug Slack bots without deploying to production.

Botarium provides a Slack API emulator, a desktop chat UI, and scaffolding tools so you can develop bots entirely on your machine.

Architecture

This is a Bun monorepo with two apps and three packages:

apps/
  electron/   - Desktop app (Electron) — bundles the emulator, bots, and UI
  ui/         - Chat interface (Svelte 5, Tailwind CSS)

packages/
  core/       - Runtime, plugin system, and CLI entry point
  slack/      - Slack API emulator (HTTP + WebSocket server)
  create-bot/ - Bot scaffolding CLI (create-botarium)

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Bun >= 1.0.0

Setup

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Start the dev environment (UI + Electron)
bun run dev:electron

Create a Bot

bun run cli create

This walks you through setting up a new bot with options for AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter), database adapter (SQLite, Postgres), and template.

Scripts

Command	Description
bun run dev	Start the web UI
bun run dev:electron	Start the desktop app
bun run cli create	Scaffold a new bot
bun run build	Build all packages
bun run package	Package the Electron app
bun run test	Run tests
bun run check	Typecheck + format + lint

Configuration

Copy .env.example to .env and adjust values. See .env.example for all available options including data directory, logging, emulator port, and Electron settings.

License

MIT