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Dobot

Dobot is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework, customised for the Digital Oxford Slack group. It was initially generated by generator-hubot, and configured to be deployed on Heroku or similar to get you up and running as quick as possible.

The following README is adapted from the Hubot template.

If you want to add your group to Dobot's Meetup integration, take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions.

Deployment

Dobot is currently deployed to a private server managed by Marcus Noble due to the free tier of Heroku not being enough for the amount of traffic we have. Deployment is handled automatically by Travis whenever code is merged into the #master branch.

Running hubot Locally

You can test your hubot by running the following.

You can start hubot locally by running:

% bin/hubot

You'll see some start up output about where your scripts come from and a prompt:

[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading adapter shell
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading scripts from /home/tomb/Development/hubot/scripts
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading scripts from /home/tomb/Development/hubot/src/scripts
Hubot>

Then you can interact with hubot by typing hubot help.

hubot> hubot help

hubot> animate me <query> - The same thing as `image me`, except adds a few
convert me <expression> to <units> - Convert expression to given units.
help - Displays all of the help commands that Hubot knows about.
...

Meetup Integration

Dobot checks the Meetup API for upcoming Meetups when asked. If you ask "When's the next JSOxford event?", it'll check the API and come back to you with the who, what, when and where. If you don't specify a group, it'll look for the next meetup for all of the groups in the Digital Oxford community.

In order to get this functionality to run locally, you will need to provide your own API key and set the system environment variable MEETUP_API_KEY to that value. You can get your API key from this link. One way of doing this is by editing bin/hubot. Add the key before the last line like so:

export MEETUP_API_KEY="****************************"

For Windows users, edit bin/hubot.cmd and add the line like this:

set MEETUP_API_KEY=****************************

Remember that your API key is a secret. The edit you make to your startup file should not be committed back to GitHub.

Scripting

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.

hubot-scripts

There will inevitably be functionality that everyone will want. Instead of writing it yourself, you can check hubot-scripts for existing scripts.

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.

external-scripts

Hubot is able to load scripts from third-party npm package. Check the package's documentation, but in general it is:

  1. Add the packages as dependencies into your package.json
  2. npm install to make sure those packages are installed
  3. Add the package name to external-scripts.json as a double quoted string

You can review external-scripts.json to see what is included by default.

Persistence

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 require 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

Adapters are the interface to the service you want your hubot to run on. This can be something like 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 and run npm install 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.

Deployment

% 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.

Deploying to UNIX or Windows

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.

Campfire Variables

If you are using the Campfire adapter you will need to set some environment variables. Refer to the documentation for other adapters and the configuraiton of those, 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"

Restart the bot

You may want to get comfortable with heroku logs and heroku restart if you're having issues.