bolts is a chatbot for the CiviCRM community, aiming to helpfully provide contextual information and perform simple tasks. Examples include giving links and titles for mentioned JIRA issues, announcing new blog posts and CiviCRM.SE questions, and running simple tasks like checking if sites are up or mobile friendly. In channel, ask @bolts help for a list of commands; if you want a sandbox to interact with bolts, head on over to ~x-bot-test! More info at github.com/xurizaemon/bolts, suggestions / contributions welcome via issue queue.
If bolts is misbehaving or annoying, talk to @xurizaemon or @joemcl about it. If they aren't around, you could ask someone in ~infrastructure channel to ban bolts.
If the behaviour isn't that bad, you're welcome to open an issue instead! Please note that saying "@bolts" in the issue queue will ping Github's @bolts, who is neither a bot nor involved with CiviCRM project.
bolts is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework. It was initially generated by generator-hubot, and configured to be deployed on Heroku to get you up and running as quick as possible.
Hop onto CiviCRM Chat and @bolts will be present in some channels. What @bolts can do depends on the plugins loaded, so rather than trying to document them here, just ask @bolts:
> you: @bolts help
> bolts: < ... list of things bolts can do ... >
Please use @bolts mindfully! We want @bolts to be fun and useful, while avoiding divisive or disrespectful behaviour. @bolts is covered by the CiviCRM code of conduct, so please keep that in mind. In particular: it's possible to make @bolts your "mouthpiece" via some interactions, but this is permitted on the understanding that your speech through @bolts is respectful and avoids being derogatory, regardless of the subject.
- This repo, bolts.
- hubot-bolts, some custom commands (eg a reload command)
- hubot-twitter-mention, a fork of hubot-twitter-mention
- Other packages listed in package.json
- Open issues for things you think @bolts could do for CiviCRM.
- Add features! Many things can be delivered just by submitting a suitable config for an existing hubot module.
- There's a channel on https://chat.civicrm.org for bot testing:
x-bot-test - Bolts uses the
mattermost-useradapter, but there are alternatives. - Here's a brain dump of some things we use a bot for at Fuzion
You can test your hubot by running the following, however some plugins will not behave as expected unless the environment variables they rely upon have been set.
You can start bolts locally by running:
% bin/hubot
You'll see some start up output and a prompt:
[Sat Feb 28 2015 12:38:27 GMT+0000 (GMT)] INFO Using default redis on localhost:6379
bolts>
Then you can interact with bolts by typing bolts help.
bolts> bolts help
bolts animate me <query> - The same thing as `image me`, except adds [snip]
bolts help - Displays all of the help commands that bolts knows about.
...
A few scripts (including some installed by default) require environment variables to be set as a simple form of configuration.
heroku config
For UNIX platform, a file .config.sh is sourced by bin/hubot if detected.
Copy example-config.sh to that location and configure accordingly, or if on
non-UNIX platform, do something similar.
Each script should have a commented header which contains a "Configuration" section that explains which values it requires to be placed in which variable. When you have lots of scripts installed this process can be quite labour intensive. The following shell command can be used as a stop gap until an easier way to do this has been implemented.
grep -o 'hubot-[a-z0-9_-]\+' external-scripts.json | \
xargs -n1 -I {} sh -c 'sed -n "/^# Configuration/,/^#$/ s/^/{} /p" \
$(find node_modules/{}/ -name "*.coffee")' | \
awk -F '#' '{ printf "%-25s %s\n", $1, $2 }'
How to set environment variables will be specific to your operating system. Rather than recreate the various methods and best practices in achieving this, it's suggested that you search for a dedicated guide focused on your OS.
An example script is included at scripts/example.coffee, so check it out to
get started, along with the Scripting Guide.
For many common tasks, there's a good chance someone has already one to do just the thing.
There will inevitably be functionality that everyone will want. Instead of writing it yourself, you can use existing plugins.
Hubot is able to load plugins from third-party npm packages. This is the
recommended way to add functionality to your hubot. You can get a list of
available hubot plugins on npmjs.com or by using npm search:
% npm search hubot-scripts panda
NAME DESCRIPTION AUTHOR DATE VERSION KEYWORDS
hubot-pandapanda a hubot script for panda responses =missu 2014-11-30 0.9.2 hubot hubot-scripts panda
...
To use a package, check the package's documentation, but in general it is:
- Use
npm install --saveto add the package topackage.jsonand install it - Add the package name to
external-scripts.jsonas a double quoted string
You can review external-scripts.json to see what is included by default.
It is also possible to define external-scripts.json as an object to
explicitly specify which scripts from a package should be included. The example
below, for example, will only activate two of the six available scripts inside
the hubot-fun plugin, but all four of those in hubot-auto-deploy.
{
"hubot-fun": [
"crazy",
"thanks"
],
"hubot-auto-deploy": "*"
}Be aware that not all plugins support this usage and will typically fallback to including all scripts.
Before hubot plugin packages were adopted, most plugins were held in the hubot-scripts package. Some of these plugins have yet to be migrated to their own packages. They can still be used but the setup is a bit different.
To enable scripts from the hubot-scripts package, add the script name with
extension as a double quoted string to the hubot-scripts.json file in this
repo.
If you are going to use the hubot-redis-brain package (strongly suggested),
you will need to add the Redis to Go addon on Heroku which requires a verified
account or you can create an account at Redis to Go and manually
set the REDISTOGO_URL variable.
% heroku config:add REDISTOGO_URL="..."
If you don't need any persistence feel free to remove the hubot-redis-brain
from external-scripts.json and you don't need to worry about redis at all.
Adapters are the interface to the service you want your hubot to run on, such as Campfire or IRC. There are a number of third party adapters that the community have contributed. Check Hubot Adapters for the available ones.
If you would like to run a non-Campfire or shell adapter you will need to add
the adapter package as a dependency to the package.json file in the
dependencies section.
Once you've added the dependency with npm install --save to install it you
can then run hubot with the adapter.
% bin/hubot -a <adapter>
Where <adapter> is the name of your adapter without the hubot- prefix.
% heroku create --stack cedar
% git push heroku master
If your Heroku account has been verified you can run the following to enable and add the Redis to Go addon to your app.
% heroku addons:add redistogo:nano
If you run into any problems, checkout Heroku's docs.
You'll need to edit the Procfile to set the name of your hubot.
More detailed documentation can be found on the deploying hubot onto Heroku wiki page.
If you would like to deploy to either a UNIX operating system or Windows. Please check out the deploying hubot onto UNIX and deploying hubot onto Windows wiki pages.
If you are using the Campfire adapter you will need to set some environment variables. If not, refer to your adapter documentation for how to configure it, links to the adapters can be found on Hubot Adapters.
Create a separate Campfire user for your bot and get their token from the web UI.
% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_TOKEN="..."
Get the numeric IDs of the rooms you want the bot to join, comma delimited. If
you want the bot to connect to https://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com/room/42
and https://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com/room/1024 then you'd add it like
this:
% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_ROOMS="42,1024"
Add the subdomain hubot should connect to. If you web URL looks like
http://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com then you'd add it like this:
% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_ACCOUNT="mysubdomain"
You may want to get comfortable with heroku logs and heroku restart if
you're having issues.