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ein

ein is 1) a super-smart animated character on the anime series Cowboy Bebob; 2) a real-life Australian Shepherd + part-time Bocoup office greeter; and 3) a chat bot for slack built on the Hubot framework. It was initially generated by generator-hubot, and configured for deployment via Heroku.

This README is mostly intended to document the bot for my colleagues and also to help me remember WTF I did (this is baby's first bot). Feel free to use ein as is for yourself - but probably go to the Hubot docs if you want to build your own bot.

Running ein Locally

You can start ein 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
ein>

Then you can interact with ein by typing ein help.

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

The following plugins for ein will not behave as exepected unless you set your own environment variables:

  • hubot-pearson-dictionary (must create api key)

Configuration

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

As mentioned above, ein has been configured to deploy to heroku. Since I'm using the free heroku/redis offerings, he "wakes up" at 7:00 EST and goes to sleep at midnight. If you're a fellow Bocouper and you want to make some ein upgrades, lmk and I'll add you as a collaborator.

Scripting

Ein has a script for simple interactions: scripts/einthedog.coffee. There's a Scripting Guide from github that's been helpful and a boatload of other scripts for common tasks on NPM.

external-scripts

Ein makes use of the following existing plugins via npm packages:

% npm search hubot-scripts panda
NAME             DESCRIPTION                        AUTHOR DATE       VERSION KEYWORDS
hubot-appearin makes appearin rooms for quick meetings =missu 2014-11-30 0.9.2   hubot hubot-scripts panda
hubot-calculator
hubot-diagnostics
hubot-google
hubot-google-images
hubot-google-translate
hubot-maps
hubot-pearson-dictionary
hubot-slack
hubot-xkcd
...

This is the recommended way to add functionality to your hubot:

  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

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

% heroku create --stack cedar
% git push heroku master

If your Heroku account has been verified you can run the following to enable and add the Redis to Go addon to your app.

% heroku addons:add redistogo:nano

If you run into any problems, checkout Heroku's docs.

You'll need to edit the Procfile to set the name of your hubot.

More detailed documentation can be found on the deploying hubot onto Heroku wiki page.

Deploying to UNIX or Windows

If you would like to deploy to either a UNIX operating system or Windows. Please check out the deploying hubot onto UNIX and deploying hubot onto Windows wiki pages.

Restart the bot

You may want to get comfortable with heroku logs and heroku restart if you're having issues.