This is a version of GitHub's chat bot, Hubot. We use it to do silly things in our Slack chat.
If you want to run PushBot, you'll need a few things on your system:
- node.js and
npm, the server-side JavaScript runtime. You can grab the tarballs from there or follow Joyent's other installation instructions. Personally, I use nvm, which is installed by my dotfiles. - Redis, a key-value store that's used for persistent storage. You should have a package for this for your operating system.
You can test your hubot locally by running the following:
% bin/hubot
You'll see some start up output about where your scripts come from and a prompt.
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading adapter shell
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading scripts from /home/tomb/Development/hubot/scripts
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading scripts from /home/tomb/Development/hubot/src/scripts
Hubot>
Then you can interact with hubot by typing hubot help.
Hubot> hubot help
Hubot> animate me <query> - The same thing as `image me`, except adds a few
convert me <expression> to <units> - Convert expression to given units.
help - Displays all of the help commands that Hubot knows about.
...
Want to contribute scripts? Here are a few references that might be handy.
- Scripts are written in a language called CoffeeScript, a JavaScript transpiler.
- If you need a reference for JavaScript itself, I recommend the Mozilla developer network.
- Hubot's scripting API is documented in the hubot repo. You can also use the other scripts in
scripts/for reference, of course.
If your script starts to become big and complicated, you should consider extracting it to its own npm package. I did this for hubot-markov if you'd like to see an example. hubot-example is a template library that you can clone as a starting point: make sure you edit the package.json info before you publish!