6 ms·

GitHub open sources Hubot (chat bot)

420 points by technoweenie 15y ago

gbelote 15y ago
This is great, thanks GitHub! I've been procrastinating on writing my own Hubot, now I don't have to!
llimllib 15y ago
Here's our ruby campfire chatbot, developed for our office. Many more plugins! Ruby! https://github.com/markolson/linkbot https://github.com/markolson/linkbot edit: for comparison, our google image plugin: https://github.com/markolson/linkbot/blob/master/plugins/image.rb https://github.com/markolson/linkbot/blob/master/plugins/ima... vs. theirs: https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/scripts/google-images.coffee https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/script...
- adbachman 15y ago
  Oh yeah? I'll see your ruby campfire chatbot and raise you another http-aware coffeescript heroku chatbot: https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot Ours can even receive web hooks. For example, it tell us when someone makes a commit on one of our Github repos: https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot/blob/master/src/plugins/github.coffee https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot/blob/master... Pat has done a lot for our morale.
ethank 15y ago
/Stops writing his own Hubot in coffeescript/node
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Mine is(was?) in Python with an XMPP lib. I hadn't gotten around to solving the async problem yet, so I'll probably just jump to Hubot.
  - ethank 15y ago
    I wrote one in Python (Twisted) a while back, but with any of these things: better for more to maintain it than just me. Mine was XMPP but also supported other async protocols (Redis PubSub, Spread).
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  too late for me :( http://github.com/grifo/florinda http://github.com/grifo/florinda Looking at it, it's very possible that hubot's scripts are interchangeable with ours with a small translation layer.
josephruscio 15y ago
Awesome to see this out in the open now :-). In the spirit of sharing, here's our campfire bot developed in Ruby on top of the Scamp (https://github.com/wjessop/Scamp https://github.com/wjessop/Scamp) framework: https://github.com/josephruscio/twke https://github.com/josephruscio/twke May not have started it if the hubbers hadn't taken so long with hubot ;-).
puls 15y ago
I've written internal chat room bots at multiple companies. Making a definitive open-source solution to this is long overdue.
jashkenas 15y ago
Direct link to the source code of the included Hubot Scripts: https://github.com/github/hubot/tree/master/src/hubot/scripts https://github.com/github/hubot/tree/master/src/hubot/script... ... It's pretty great how short and sweet these are.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  I just read through five of those and didn't even notice they were in CoffeeScript until I saw your username here! Congrats on creating such an eminently readable language - it just melted away into the background while I was enjoying the actual logic and functionality described in the code.
grandalf 15y ago
Hubot, meet Siri.
- tombell 15y ago
  Siri meet Hubot - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156221 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156221
  - guywithabike 15y ago
    Or, if you don't want to pay for a phone number and text messages: https://github.com/tysontate/siri_says https://github.com/tysontate/siri_says
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
Yummy. Think I'll try and adapt this to XMPP over the weekend and toss my custom (read: ugly) Python bot for our office.
- pedoh 15y ago
  What python module did you wind up using for your Python bot?
  - ConstantineXVI 15y ago
    I'm using Wokkel (the bleeding-edge version of the Twisted XMPP lib IIRC); EDIT: if memory serves, I used this as an example: https://github.com/colagrosso/rainbot https://github.com/colagrosso/rainbot. Nothing particularly wrong with Wokkel, just the bot itself has grown tremendously ugly.
- timc3 15y ago
  That would be awesome.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  Don't wait on me, someone's already hacked it in before I could even get home and have dinner. https://github.com/markstory/hubot/tree/xmpp https://github.com/markstory/hubot/tree/xmpp
mitchellhislop 15y ago
Its really a testament to GitHub how many of us started a project like this when we kept hearing about the greatness of Hubot. I am really pumped to see what the community comes up with as far as scripts go. Pumped to see at least the start of IRC support - I figured it was Campfire only, and would have to hack it myself to make it do IRC
nosequel 15y ago
Okay, sorry ahead of time for being a Debbie downer here, but there are no work-related or useful scripts in the repository. All the great stuff they talk about running builds, deploying code, checking on servers, getting test results are not there. I don't see youtube and google images lookups all that useful as a chatbot IMHO. So, what am I missing? It seems like people think this is cool, but I guess I don't get it.
- holman 15y ago
  We're just shipping the foundation right now. A lot of our other stuff is tied to a substantial amount of other services (our CI, our special build layer, various other home-grown services, etc). Over time — and judging from Twitter, very quickly! — github.com/github/hubot-scripts will have a much more comprehensive set of scripts.
  - nosequel 15y ago
    Well that's good to hear. I didn't mean to sound like a dick by any means, I just didn't expect to only see mustache generators. Your posts on it particularly in your blog made me excited to look at the repo for the infrastructure / CI components. Looking forward to the future. And dumb question here probably, but was I wrong in thinking that it was originally written in Ruby?
    - holman 15y ago
      We love Ruby, but Hubot's always been written in Node.js. (Today's Hubot was rewritten to CoffeeScript, which we also love.) We're still in the process of porting a lot of stuff over from old-hubot, so we'll be making a lot more contributions ourselves yet.
      - nosequel 15y ago
        Bah, my memory did not serve me well then. Looking at the scripts they are certainly clean now, so kudos on the re-write! Hope you guys / gals are ready for a pull-request torrent this week!
willbmoss 15y ago
At Bump we tried Campfire, but ended up using IRC (and use an open source IRC bot, https://bitbucket.org/yougov/pmxbot/src https://bitbucket.org/yougov/pmxbot/src). I'm curious why you decided to go with Campfire instead of IRC.
- technoweenie 15y ago
  Hubot supports IRC too (though probably not as well, we only hop in when Campfire goes down). We depend on having a nice, customizable native Campfire client. We keep a custom js script in DropBox that Propane (http://propaneapp.com/ http://propaneapp.com/) loads on startup. We've been able to modify the UI to show avatars, highlight successful/failed builds in Git push notifications, etc. CF also gives us a few other nice features, like offline transcripts with search, and STARS. Surely, you can do all this with IRC... and there are other chat apps that people like too. We're hoping that people add support for them to Hubot.
  - dabeeeenster 15y ago
    There's nothing in the docs to explain how to configure IRC server address/password etc?
    - dannytatom 15y ago
      Seems like it's done by env variables, same way it's setup for Campfire: https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/irc.coffee#L17-19 https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/irc.co...
      - dabeeeenster 15y ago
        Ah great thanks. Shame there's no IRC server password support just yet it seems...
        xpaulbettsx 15y ago
        It's on its way, will probably finish it up this week
freemarketteddy 15y ago
what would be a quick way to deploy hubot on my mac
- nosequel 15y ago
  $ sudo brew install node.js $ sudo curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh $ wget https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.0.tar.gz https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.0.tar.gz $ tar zxvf hubot-1.0.0.tar.gz $ cd hubot $ npm install $ ./bin/hubot Mine had some path issues that showed up as env: coffee: No such file or directory but manually setting the path to the .bin directory in hubot's generated node_modules seemed to do the trick.
  - atmos 15y ago
    We've released 1.0.2 to deal with this. Sorry for the confusion, https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz
    - nosequel 15y ago
      Thanks, I was going to put in a PR, but you got to it first.
  - lparry 15y ago
    you shouldnt need to sudo "brew install" commands. if you do, you've messed up the permissions it's setup. there's a part in their faq about why they believe sudo is bad https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/FAQ
listrophy 15y ago
So.... who's gonna be the first to hook this up to a Nest Thermostat?
sudonim 15y ago
If you're actually planning to deploy this to heroku, you may need to make one little change to the code. Everything worked great except for this: https://github.com/titanous/hubot/commit/6fc90ecd9b47cbb97140201b91335bc6a9850a85 https://github.com/titanous/hubot/commit/6fc90ecd9b47cbb9714... Also, you'll probably be restarting a bunch to get hubot up, but seems pretty stable after that. Nice work Github! Took me about a 1/2 hour to get it up and running.
- atmos 15y ago
  This is fixed in the 1.0.2 release, https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz
- Fluxx 15y ago
  I know nothing about node, but I had to add coffee-script as a dependency to my package.json file. Will I not have to do that cause of this fix?
jonursenbach 15y ago
If anyone is interested in another alternative, check out my node-smores framework. https://github.com/jonursenbach/node-smores https://github.com/jonursenbach/node-smores Shameless plug, but I could use some help fleshing out useful plugins.
joshwa 15y ago
Funny, just today I was revisiting my decently-widely-used campfire bot: http://github.com/joshwand/campfire-bot http://github.com/joshwand/campfire-bot In the process of gemifying the bot and the plugins separately to make maintenance easier.
dustinupdyke 15y ago
I first heard of Hubot from Zach Holman here: http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2011/04/hubot-githubs-valiant-campfire-bot-expands-his-capabilities.html http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2011/04/hubot-gith... He also posts great stuff on his own site FWIW here: http://zachholman.com/ http://zachholman.com/
shykes 15y ago
It was already adapted for deployment on dotcloud! https://github.com/miyagawa/hubot-dotcloud https://github.com/miyagawa/hubot-dotcloud
siong1987 15y ago
If you are using HipChat, I already ported part of the code. It should be usable. But, this can be made better. https://github.com/siong1987/hubot/tree/hipchat https://github.com/siong1987/hubot/tree/hipchat
- justinweiss 15y ago
  Also, if you're using HipChat, you should give robut a try: https://github.com/justinweiss/robut https://github.com/justinweiss/robut

420 points by technoweenie 15y ago

This is great, thanks GitHub! I've been procrastinating on writing my own Hubot, now I don't have to!

Here's our ruby campfire chatbot, developed for our office. Many more plugins! Ruby! https://github.com/markolson/linkbot https://github.com/markolson/linkbot edit: for comparison, our google image plugin: https://github.com/markolson/linkbot/blob/master/plugins/image.rb https://github.com/markolson/linkbot/blob/master/plugins/ima... vs. theirs: https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/scripts/google-images.coffee https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/script...

adbachman 15y ago
Oh yeah? I'll see your ruby campfire chatbot and raise you another http-aware coffeescript heroku chatbot: https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot Ours can even receive web hooks. For example, it tell us when someone makes a commit on one of our Github repos: https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot/blob/master/src/plugins/github.coffee https://github.com/abachman/pat-the-campfire-bot/blob/master... Pat has done a lot for our morale.

ethank 15y ago

/Stops writing his own Hubot in coffeescript/node

dpritchett 15y ago
Mine is(was?) in Python with an XMPP lib. I hadn't gotten around to solving the async problem yet, so I'll probably just jump to Hubot.
- ethank 15y ago
  I wrote one in Python (Twisted) a while back, but with any of these things: better for more to maintain it than just me. Mine was XMPP but also supported other async protocols (Redis PubSub, Spread).
ricardobeat 15y ago
too late for me :( http://github.com/grifo/florinda http://github.com/grifo/florinda Looking at it, it's very possible that hubot's scripts are interchangeable with ours with a small translation layer.

josephruscio 15y ago

Awesome to see this out in the open now :-). In the spirit of sharing, here's our campfire bot developed in Ruby on top of the Scamp (https://github.com/wjessop/Scamp https://github.com/wjessop/Scamp) framework: https://github.com/josephruscio/twke https://github.com/josephruscio/twke May not have started it if the hubbers hadn't taken so long with hubot ;-).

puls 15y ago

I've written internal chat room bots at multiple companies. Making a definitive open-source solution to this is long overdue.

jashkenas 15y ago

Direct link to the source code of the included Hubot Scripts: https://github.com/github/hubot/tree/master/src/hubot/scripts https://github.com/github/hubot/tree/master/src/hubot/script... ... It's pretty great how short and sweet these are.

dpritchett 15y ago
I just read through five of those and didn't even notice they were in CoffeeScript until I saw your username here! Congrats on creating such an eminently readable language - it just melted away into the background while I was enjoying the actual logic and functionality described in the code.

grandalf 15y ago

Hubot, meet Siri.

tombell 15y ago
Siri meet Hubot - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156221 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156221
- guywithabike 15y ago
  Or, if you don't want to pay for a phone number and text messages: https://github.com/tysontate/siri_says https://github.com/tysontate/siri_says

ConstantineXVI 15y ago

Yummy. Think I'll try and adapt this to XMPP over the weekend and toss my custom (read: ugly) Python bot for our office.

pedoh 15y ago
What python module did you wind up using for your Python bot?
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  I'm using Wokkel (the bleeding-edge version of the Twisted XMPP lib IIRC); EDIT: if memory serves, I used this as an example: https://github.com/colagrosso/rainbot https://github.com/colagrosso/rainbot. Nothing particularly wrong with Wokkel, just the bot itself has grown tremendously ugly.
timc3 15y ago
That would be awesome.
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
Don't wait on me, someone's already hacked it in before I could even get home and have dinner. https://github.com/markstory/hubot/tree/xmpp https://github.com/markstory/hubot/tree/xmpp

mitchellhislop 15y ago

Its really a testament to GitHub how many of us started a project like this when we kept hearing about the greatness of Hubot. I am really pumped to see what the community comes up with as far as scripts go. Pumped to see at least the start of IRC support - I figured it was Campfire only, and would have to hack it myself to make it do IRC

nosequel 15y ago

Okay, sorry ahead of time for being a Debbie downer here, but there are no work-related or useful scripts in the repository. All the great stuff they talk about running builds, deploying code, checking on servers, getting test results are not there. I don't see youtube and google images lookups all that useful as a chatbot IMHO. So, what am I missing? It seems like people think this is cool, but I guess I don't get it.

holman 15y ago
We're just shipping the foundation right now. A lot of our other stuff is tied to a substantial amount of other services (our CI, our special build layer, various other home-grown services, etc). Over time — and judging from Twitter, very quickly! — github.com/github/hubot-scripts will have a much more comprehensive set of scripts.
- nosequel 15y ago
  Well that's good to hear. I didn't mean to sound like a dick by any means, I just didn't expect to only see mustache generators. Your posts on it particularly in your blog made me excited to look at the repo for the infrastructure / CI components. Looking forward to the future. And dumb question here probably, but was I wrong in thinking that it was originally written in Ruby?
  - holman 15y ago
    We love Ruby, but Hubot's always been written in Node.js. (Today's Hubot was rewritten to CoffeeScript, which we also love.) We're still in the process of porting a lot of stuff over from old-hubot, so we'll be making a lot more contributions ourselves yet.
    - nosequel 15y ago
      Bah, my memory did not serve me well then. Looking at the scripts they are certainly clean now, so kudos on the re-write! Hope you guys / gals are ready for a pull-request torrent this week!

willbmoss 15y ago

At Bump we tried Campfire, but ended up using IRC (and use an open source IRC bot, https://bitbucket.org/yougov/pmxbot/src https://bitbucket.org/yougov/pmxbot/src). I'm curious why you decided to go with Campfire instead of IRC.

technoweenie 15y ago
Hubot supports IRC too (though probably not as well, we only hop in when Campfire goes down). We depend on having a nice, customizable native Campfire client. We keep a custom js script in DropBox that Propane (http://propaneapp.com/ http://propaneapp.com/) loads on startup. We've been able to modify the UI to show avatars, highlight successful/failed builds in Git push notifications, etc. CF also gives us a few other nice features, like offline transcripts with search, and STARS. Surely, you can do all this with IRC... and there are other chat apps that people like too. We're hoping that people add support for them to Hubot.
- dabeeeenster 15y ago
  There's nothing in the docs to explain how to configure IRC server address/password etc?
  - dannytatom 15y ago
    Seems like it's done by env variables, same way it's setup for Campfire: https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/irc.coffee#L17-19 https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/src/hubot/irc.co...
    - dabeeeenster 15y ago
      Ah great thanks. Shame there's no IRC server password support just yet it seems...
      - xpaulbettsx 15y ago
        It's on its way, will probably finish it up this week

freemarketteddy 15y ago

what would be a quick way to deploy hubot on my mac

nosequel 15y ago
$ sudo brew install node.js $ sudo curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh $ wget https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.0.tar.gz https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.0.tar.gz $ tar zxvf hubot-1.0.0.tar.gz $ cd hubot $ npm install $ ./bin/hubot Mine had some path issues that showed up as env: coffee: No such file or directory but manually setting the path to the .bin directory in hubot's generated node_modules seemed to do the trick.
- atmos 15y ago
  We've released 1.0.2 to deal with this. Sorry for the confusion, https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz
  - nosequel 15y ago
    Thanks, I was going to put in a PR, but you got to it first.
- lparry 15y ago
  you shouldnt need to sudo "brew install" commands. if you do, you've messed up the permissions it's setup. there's a part in their faq about why they believe sudo is bad https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/FAQ

listrophy 15y ago

So.... who's gonna be the first to hook this up to a Nest Thermostat?

sudonim 15y ago

If you're actually planning to deploy this to heroku, you may need to make one little change to the code. Everything worked great except for this: https://github.com/titanous/hubot/commit/6fc90ecd9b47cbb97140201b91335bc6a9850a85 https://github.com/titanous/hubot/commit/6fc90ecd9b47cbb9714... Also, you'll probably be restarting a bunch to get hubot up, but seems pretty stable after that. Nice work Github! Took me about a 1/2 hour to get it up and running.

atmos 15y ago
This is fixed in the 1.0.2 release, https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz https://github.com/downloads/github/hubot/hubot-1.0.2.tar.gz
Fluxx 15y ago
I know nothing about node, but I had to add coffee-script as a dependency to my package.json file. Will I not have to do that cause of this fix?

jonursenbach 15y ago

If anyone is interested in another alternative, check out my node-smores framework. https://github.com/jonursenbach/node-smores https://github.com/jonursenbach/node-smores Shameless plug, but I could use some help fleshing out useful plugins.

joshwa 15y ago

Funny, just today I was revisiting my decently-widely-used campfire bot: http://github.com/joshwand/campfire-bot http://github.com/joshwand/campfire-bot In the process of gemifying the bot and the plugins separately to make maintenance easier.

dustinupdyke 15y ago

I first heard of Hubot from Zach Holman here: http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2011/04/hubot-githubs-valiant-campfire-bot-expands-his-capabilities.html http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2011/04/hubot-gith... He also posts great stuff on his own site FWIW here: http://zachholman.com/ http://zachholman.com/

shykes 15y ago

It was already adapted for deployment on dotcloud! https://github.com/miyagawa/hubot-dotcloud https://github.com/miyagawa/hubot-dotcloud

siong1987 15y ago

If you are using HipChat, I already ported part of the code. It should be usable. But, this can be made better. https://github.com/siong1987/hubot/tree/hipchat https://github.com/siong1987/hubot/tree/hipchat

justinweiss 15y ago
Also, if you're using HipChat, you should give robut a try: https://github.com/justinweiss/robut https://github.com/justinweiss/robut