Nostrbots

Table of Contents

• About
  • Features
• Setup
  • Command-line instructions
  • Libraries
  • Define your relays
  • Define the private key
  • Pipelines
• Documentation

Caution

THIS REPO IS NOT YET RELEASED! WORK IN PROGRESS.

About

This is a Nostr microapp that allows you to publish kind 30023 long-form notes, with or without an associated kind 1111 comment or kind 01 notification. It also helps you to run bots from a Jenkins automation server, that publishes those notes, according to a schedule or other trigger.

Figure 1. Nostrbot use case diagram

You could, for instance, have a release bot that sends out a notification of a new software release, when that build passes. Or you could have a test failed bot, that warns you on Nostr, if an automated test fails.

Other possible applications are newsletters, software testing, relay/server testing, or preparing articles in advance and then sending them off at some later time.

Features

• ✓ setup npub login

• ✓ setup article bot

  • ❏ add article notifications

  • ❏ add article comments

• ❏ setup comment bot

• ❏ setup notification bot

Setup

This repository contains an example bot (located in the /botData/anExampleBot folder), that you can use to test it out.

AnExampleBot:

1. publishes an article to the public OtherStuff relay wss://thecitadel.nostr1.com, and then

2. publishes a comment or notification with the naddr for the article embedded (if so selected), and then

3. prints out hyperlinks, to view both events on Njump.

Command-line instructions

To run the bot in the shell, use the following command:

php bot.php anExampleBot

This command simply accepts the argument for the folder that the bot is located in. Everything else is configured in the yaml file.

To have differently-behaving bots, simple duplicate anExampleBot for each one, rename the folder, and configure them, accordingly. Then call them according to their folder name.

php bot.php myNewBot12

Libraries

Nostrbots is written in PHP 8 (with the yaml PECL extension) and NAK, so those are two things that’ll need to be installed and configured, for this to work properly. I will be slowly phasing out the NAK commands, as PHP Helper library adds the features I need.

I’ve set this repo up with composer, so composer install might be enough to get you started. Please ask for help, if it doesn’t work, so that I can fix it!

Note	I can be contacted using my npub npub1l5sga6xg72phsz5422ykujprejwud075ggrr3z2hwyrfgr7eylqstegx9z or over GitHub.

Define your relays

Check the src/relays.yml file, to see if you want to add or delete any from this personal list. It’s the relay list used for performing most of the functions. You can name the categories however you want, or just have no categories (then the bots use the entire list).

Define the private key

Make sure to set the environment variable NOSTR_BOT_KEY1 (and NOSTR_BOT_KEY2, etc. depending on how many bots you run) with the appropriate nsec (from whichever npub you want the bots to publish from), as that’s how the info is passed to the script, for logging into private or authorized relays, or for signing events. This can be done under Linux with export NOSTR_BOT_KEY1=<hex private key>

That’ll work, when running the PHP scripts from the command line, but you’ll have to finagle it a bit, within Jenkins, by setting the variables as secret text under (for a local Jenkins) http://localhost:8081/credentials/. Like so:

Figure 2. credentials page

If you do not have a bot npub, yet, you can enter php src/newKeys.php on the command line and receive a full set from the PHP Helper.

Pipelines

The bot-pipeline jenkinsfile needs to be manually edited, to match your bot information. Then, just go to your Jenkins instance, make sure that you have the appropriate plug-ins installed, and setup a pipeline build. You just need to tell it to use your git repo, where that repo is located, and precisely which jenkinsfile you want it to use, for that build.

Figure 3. pipeline form

Figure 4. jenkinsfile form

These will usually function like simple cron jobs, so set the build periodically setting, within the Jenkins GUI.

Figure 5. build trigger

Documentation

If you are interested in how it works, under the hood, I have some technical documentation.

Figure 6. class diagram