myhubot

myhubot is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework. It was initially generated by generator-hubot.

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 he has, etc!

Running myhubot 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.

In addition to setting the environment variables this hubot also supports settings via ini file.

The ini file hubot_secrets.ini must be in the folder of myhubot with the section environment otherwise hubot will trow and error.

You can start myhubot 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
myhubot>

Then you can interact with myhubot by typing myhubot help.

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

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.

There is also a possibility to set the environment variables with the INI file called hubot_secrets.ini. Example:

[environment]
foo=bar

[hubot_irc]
rooms=#baz

This will populate the environment variables with:

ENVIRONMENT_FOO=bar
FOO=bar
HUBOT_IRC_ROOMS=#baz

The name of the shell variable is composed from the INI section (changed to upper case) and the variable name. Then the value is added. Try to omit quotation marks.

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.

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.

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

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

This hubot uses primarily the IRC adapter for its functionality.

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.

Deployment

Myhubot is run in supervisor. Here is an example of the config /etc/supervisor/conf.d/hubot.conf .

[program:hubot]
command=/home/hubot/myhubot/bin/hubot -a irc
directory=/home/hubot/myhubot
user=hubot
environment=HOME='/home/hubot'