pennbot

pennbot is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework. It was initially generated by generator-hubot, and is being deployed on a CentOS7 linux server.

Running pennbot 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 pennbot 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
pennbot>

Then you can interact with pennbot by typing pennbot help.

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

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 install Redis on your server.

sudo yum install redis
sudo systemctl start redis

By default, Redis will be listening on port 6379 and bound to localhost, meaning it will be able to accept connections only from a hubot running on the same computer it is running. The conf file is default located in /etc/redis.conf.

To verify that Redis is running you can try redis-cli ping which should reply PONG. You can also try sudo systemctl status redis.

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 or Mattermost. 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.

Pennbot is using the hubot-mattermost adapter found here.

Deploying with nginx

Messages to the server from mattermost will need to be sent over HTTPS listening on port 443 and passed onto hubot, running on localhost (127.0.0.1) listening on port 8080. Below is an example server block used by nginx. In this example, the source code for hubot will live in the directory /var/www/example.com.

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;

    server_name  example.com;
    root /var/www/example.com;

    ssl_certificate /path/to/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/privkey.pem;
    ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/incoming_messages/;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  }
    # logging
    access_log /var/log/nginx/bots.log;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/error_bots.log;

}

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.

Creating a service with systemd

You can use systemd on CentOS to keep hubot running in the background. Below is an example file /etc/systemd/system/examplebot.service.

[Unit]
Description=Examplebot
Requires=network.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/example.com
User=examplebot
Group=examplebot

Restart=always
; RestartSec=10

; Configure Hubot environment variables, use quotes around vars with whitespace as shown below.
;Environment="HUBOT_aaa=xxx"
;Environment="HUBOT_bbb='yyy yyy'"
Environment="MATTERMOST_INCOME_URL=https://example_mattermost_server.com/hooks/your_webhook"
Environment="MATTERMOST_ENDPOINT=/incoming_messages/"
Environment="MATTERMOST_HUBOT_USERNAME=examplebot"
Environment="MATTERMOST_ICON_URL=http://example.com/icon.jpg"
Environment="MATTERMOST_TOKEN=aaaaaaasdffffffffsss"

ExecStart=/var/www/example.com/bin/hubot --adapter mattermost

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start the service with sudo systemctl start examplebot.service

Restart the bot

Use sudo systemctl restart examplebot.service.