ICFBot

ICFBot is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework and running on Heroku. It serves the ICFB, helping out in their Slack channel.

Running icfbot 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 icfbot 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
icfbot>

Then you can interact with icfbot by typing icfbot help.

icfbot> icfbot help
icfbot animate me <query> - The same thing as `image me`, except adds [snip]
icfbot help - Displays all of the help commands that icfbot knows about.
...

Configuration

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

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.

Scripting

The scripts/ directory contains some ICFB-specific scripts. If you'd like to add some new functionality, see how it's done there and check 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 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:

1. Use npm install --save 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.

Deployment

The bot currently runs on Heroku. If you have push access on the master branch, just push to deploy a new version:

% git push heroku master

In future this might be set up as pipeline triggered by commits on GitHub.