Hubot

This is a version of GitHub's Campfire bot, hubot. He's pretty cool.

You'll probably never have to hack on this repo directly.

Instead this repo provides a library that's distributed by npm that you simply require in your project. Follow the instructions below and get your own hubot ready to deploy.

Getting your own

Make sure you have node.js and npm (npm comes with node v0.6.3+) installed.

Download the latest version of hubot.

Then follow the instructions in the README in the extracted hubot directory.

Adapters

Adapters are the interface to the service you want your hubot to run on. This can be something like Campfire or IRC. There are a number of third party adapters that the community have contributed. Check the hubot wiki for the available ones and how to create your own.

Please submit issues and pull requests for third party adapters to the adapter repo, not this repo (unless it's the Campfire or Shell adapter).

hubot-scripts

Hubot ships with a number of default scripts, but there's a growing number of extras in the hubot-scripts repository. hubot-scripts is a way to share scripts with the entire community.

Check out the README for more help on installing individual scripts.

external-scripts

This functionality allows users to enable scripts from npm packages which don't have to be included in the hubot-scripts repository.

To enable to functionality you can follow the following steps.

1. Add the packages as dependencies into your package.json
2. npm install to make sure those packages are installed

To enable third-party scripts that you've added you will need to add the package name as a double quoted string to the external-scripts.json file for your hubot.

Creating a script package

Creating a script package for hubot is very simple. Start by creating a normal npm package. Make sure you add a main file for the entry point (e.g. index.js or index.coffee).

In this entry point file you're going to have to export a function that hubot will use to load the scripts in your package. Below is a simple example for loading each script in a ./scripts directory in your package.

Fs   = require 'fs'
Path = require 'path'

module.exports = (robot) ->
  path = Path.resolve __dirname, 'scripts'
  Fs.exists path, (exists) ->
    if exists
      robot.loadFile path, file for file in Fs.readdirSync(path)

After you've built your npm package you can publish it to npmjs.

HTTP Listener

Hubot has a HTTP listener which listens on the port specified by the PORT environment variable. If PORT is not specified, the default port will be 8080.

You can specify routes to listen on in your scripts by using the router property on robot.

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.router.get "/hubot/version", (req, res) ->
    res.end robot.version

There are functions for GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, which all take a route and callback function that accepts a request and a response.

In addition, if you set CONNECT_STATIC, the HTTP listener will serve static files from this directory.

Events System

Hubot has also an node.js EventEmitter attached. It can be used for data exchange between scripts.

# src/scripts/github-commits.coffee
module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.router.post "/hubot/gh-commits", (req, res) ->
  	#code goes here
    robot.emit "commit", {
        user    : {}, #hubot user object
        repo    : 'https://github.com/github/hubot',
        hash  : '2e1951c089bd865839328592ff673d2f08153643'
    }

# src/scripts/heroku.coffee
module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.on "commit", (commit) ->
    robot.send commit.user, "Will now deploy #{commit.hash} from #{commit.repo}!"
    #deploy code goes here

If you'll provide an event, it's very recommended to include a hubot user object in data. In case of other reacting scripts want to respond to chat.

Testing hubot locally

Install all of the required dependencies by running npm install.

It's easy to test scripts locally with an interactive shell:

% export PATH="node_modules/.bin:$PATH"
% bin/hubot

... and to run unit tests:

% make test