hubot

hubot is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework. It was initially generated by generator-hubot, and configured to be deployed with Docker to get you up and running as quick as possible.

This README is intended to help get you started. Definitely update and improve to talk about your own instance, how to use and deploy, what functionality is available, etc!

Running hubot Locally

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 hubot locally by running:

yarn --frozen-lockfile
yarn start

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
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 [snip]
hubot help - Displays all of the help commands that hubot knows about.
...

Configuration

A few scripts (including some installed by default) require environment variables to be set as a simple form of configuration.

Example .docker-compose.env

HUBOT_ADAPTER=flowdock
HUBOT_FLOWDOCK_API_TOKEN=aaaa1111bbbb2222cccc3333dddd4444
HUBOT_LOG_LEVEL=debug

Scripting

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.

external-scripts

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 yarn packages. This is the recommended way to add functionality to your hubot. You can get a list of available hubot plugins on yarnpkg.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:

1. Use yarn add to add the package to package.json and install it
2. 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.

Advanced Usage

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.

hubot-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.

Persistence

This configuration uses hubot-redis-brain.

Adapters

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 yarn add to install it you can then run hubot with the adapter.

HUBOT_ADAPTER=<adapter> yarn start

Where <adapter> is the name of your adapter without the hubot- prefix.

Deployment

docker-compose pull
docker-compose build
docker-compose up