Dalek by Evome

Introduction

Dalek is a Campfire bot that load plugin dynamically and use metaprogramming to self-mutate.

What a short self-explainatory video

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9.2 or higher
• Bundler
• Redis

Existing features

The real goal behind Dalek is to keep the code base very thin and work only with modules. In order to bootstrap those plugins, some methods are available though:

• load http://example.com/mygist.txt: Dalek will read the content of the mygist.txt file and execute it.
• help: Dalek will output a list of known commands

How to create a plugin

Dalek provides a small Sinatra-like DSL. Let's say you have a gist like:

  on 'foo' do
    say 'bar'
  end

and you load it in thru Campfire: load http://....

Everytime someone will type 'foo' as the first word of a message in Campfire, Dalek will wake up and execute the body of the block. In this very case, it will send "bar" to the Campfire room.

You can use a Regex as a parameter to extract some portions of the payload like this:

  on 'weather (?<location>.*)' do
    result = some_logic_to_get_the_weather_of(params[:location])
    say result
  end

It is planned to make things a bit easier and only have to write this:

  on 'weather :location' do
    result = some_logic_to_get_the_weather_of(params[:location])
    say result
  end

Pull Requests are welcome.

How to test a plugin

TBD

How to test Dalek itself

rake should start the tests.

How to run Dalek

Dalek was made to work on Heroku's "Cedar" stack

You can run it with this command:

REDIS_URL=redis://127.0.0.1:6379 CAMPFIRE_TOKEN= CAMPFIRE_SUBDOMAIN= rake run