Running a Hubot bot

Developers should start with (or at least reference) our example Hubot demonstrating usage of the pimentaCHAT adaptor: hubot-pimentachat-boilerplate

See GitHub’s own documentation for examples on building and scripting your bot.

There is also a Yeoman generator for Hubot projects, that can generate a bot using the pimentaCHAT adapter, however it does use the latest versions of Hubot or our adapter module, which enable asynchronous processing in ES6 Javascript, along with various bug fixes.

In all cases you first need to configure the environment

Deployment examples below use either the boilerplate or a Docker instance.

Once the bot is running and is properly logged in and connected to your RC server/configured channels, you can test by logging in as a regular user (not the BOT user), go to a configured channel and start talking to your bot (you’ll find some pre-configured dialogs below).

Using the Boilerplate

Please see our boilerplate bot Getting Started docs here!

The boilerplate is essentially just a simple Node.js package that requires Hubot and the pimentaCHAT adapter. The bot can then be executed using a bin file in production, as seen here. Or via the package scripts locally using npm run local or yarn local

Using the boilerplate example, to start the bot in production, use bin/hubot -a pimentachat - will install dependencies and run the bot with pimentaCHAT’s Hubot adapter.

More info in Hubot’s own docs here

Quick Start

Create and run a pimentaCHAT bot in under two minutes.

git clone https://bitbucket.org/pimenta-group/hubot-pimentachat-boilerplate/
cd hubot-pimentachat-boilerplate
npm install

Create a .env file with content:

export PIMENTACHAT_URL=myserver.com
export PIMENTACHAT_USER=mybotuser
export PIMENTACHAT_PASSWORD=mypassword
export PIMENTACHAT_ROOM=general
export PIMENTACHAT_USE_SSL=true

Adjust the content to fit your server and user credentials. Make sure mybotuser has BOT role on the server, if you don’t know what that means, click here.

Then run the bot:

source .env
bin/hubot

On the server, login as a regular user (not the BOT user), go to GENERAL, and try: mybotuser what is the time OR mybotuser rc version

You can examine the source code of these two interactions under the /scripts directory, where you can add your own bot scripts written in Javascript.

Using Docker

First clone the source and then move into the directory.

git clone: https://bitbucket.org/pimenta-group/hubot-pimentachat-boilerplate/
cd hubot-pimentachat

Now we start the docker container.

docker run -it -e PIMENTACHAT_URL=<your pimentachat instance>:<port> \
    -e PIMENTACHAT_ROOM='' \
    -e LISTEN_ON_ALL_PUBLIC=true \
    -e PIMENTACHAT_USER=mybotuser \
    -e PIMENTACHAT_PASSWORD=mypassword \
    -e HUBOT_NAME=bot \
    -e EXTERNAL_SCRIPTS=hubot-help,hubot-diagnostic \
    -v $PWD:/home/hubot/node_modules/hubot-pimentachat pimentachat/hubot-pimentachat

On the server, login as a regular user (not the BOT user), go to GENERAL, and try:

mybotuser what is the time

Important notes

The first time you run the docker container, the image needs to be pulled from the public docker registry and it will take some time. Subsequent runs are super fast.
If you are not running Linux (i.e. if you are on a Mac or PC), you cannot use $PWD to mount the volumes. Instead, read this note here (the 2nd note on the page: If you are using Boot2Docker…) to determine the absolute path where you must place the git-cloned directory.

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Using the Boilerplate
Using Docker