Yarnbot is a Slack-bot that knows some yarn-working things, and can search Ravelry for patterns, yarn, or user favorites.

Yarnbot understands:

• <7 character abbreviations
• Yarn weights
• Needle/Hook sizes (say 'US 10', '5mm', 'Crochet L', etc)
• Basic arithmetic expressions
• weights: List all yarn weights
• ravelry favorites <Ravelry Username>
• ravelry favorites <Ravelry Username> tagged <tag>
• ravelry search <search terms>: Search patterns
• ravelry yarn <search terms>: Search yarn
• ravelry yarn similar to <search terms>: Find similar yarn
• info: Yarnbot info
• help: Help text

Before anything else will work, you will need to create a bot in Slack. In your team's app management section, create a custom integration and add a bot configuration. The API Token available there is the SLACK_API_KEY referenced below.

Use a script such as the provded example to set the various access keys and run the client. It will try to stay connected to slack until you tell it to go to sleep, which will cause it to disconnect gracefully.

Yarnbot will create a log file named yarnbot.log in the current directory. By default, it logs at the INFO level, but that can be changed by altering the logging setup at the beginning of yarnbot.py.

As it runs, it keeps track of users it has seen, and saves them in known_users.pkl. Please note that is a python pickle file.

Yarnbot requires a Slack API key, taken from the SLACK_API_KEY environment variable, as well as Ravelry OAuth1 keys, taken from RAV_ACC_KEY and RAV_SEC_KEY.

Some typical yarnbot commands

Ravelry search results show short summaries of each pattern. Clicking the pattern will take you to Ravelry to see details.

You can also search for yarn...

...and find similar yarn.