jonfairbanks/halbert

A production ready Slackbot written with Hubot

Halbert

A production ready Slackbot written with Hubot

Prerequisites

A Slackbot token pre-configured for your team is required. Checkout the Slack docs for more information.

Start the Container Headless

If you do not want to connect to the container and just want to run it, use daemon mode with -d:

(sudo) docker run -d \
-e HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN=<token> \
-v /logs:/app/logs \
--name halbert jonfairbanks/halbert

The logs/ volume mount can be moved as you see fit, but is required if you want hubot-chatlog files to persist container updates, reboots, etc.

Pre-installed hubot packages

• hubot-diagnostics
• hubot-help
• hubot-maps
• hubot-redis-brain
• hubot-uptime
• hubot-chatlog
• hubot-xkcd
• hubot-base64
• hubot-sha1
• Other experimental scripts can be found in the scripts/ directory.

Start and Connect to the Container for Debugging

1. To download, launch and connect to the container: (sudo) docker run -it --name halbert jonfairbanks/halbert '/bin/bash'
2. Finally, launch the bot within the container: HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN=<token> ./bin/hubot

Viewing Log Output

The output of hubot startup and any console.log() within your scripts is directed to container logs and can be viewed within Docker.

(sudo) docker logs <container name>

Unless specifically disabled, halbert also maintains a chatlog for each channel it is invited to. These logs are stored in the path specified on container launch and can also be viewed within Slack using the chatlog command.

Helpful Docker Commands for Removing/Updating Halbert

• To stop the container: (sudo) docker stop halbert
• To remove the container: (sudo) docker rm halbert
• To list containers: (sudo) docker ps -a
• To list images: (sudo) docker images
• To remove the old image: (sudo) docker rmi jonfairbanks/halbert

Environment Variables

Additional ENV variables can be passed when starting Docker with the -e flag and then accessed within scripts as process.env.ENV_VARIABLE_NAME

-e ENV_VARIABLE_NAME='My Variable'

Exposing Directories

Directories within the Docker container can be exposed to the local machine with the -v flag with parameter syntax of :.

Expose Logs Directory

-v /app/logs:/hubot/logs

Expose Scripts Directory

-v /app/scripts:/hubot/scripts

Note: exposing the entire /app directory may cause a startup failure

Exposing Ports

Docker ports can be exposed to extend functionality, such as with webhooks, using the -p flag.

-p 8080:8080 (<External Port>:<Internal Docker Port>)

Adding new packages to Hubot

docker exec -it halbert npm install hubot-packagename --save docker restart halbert

Be sure to replace 'hubot-packagename' with the desired package you wish to install. When NPM packages are installed with the name that begins with hubot-*, they will be automatically added to the external-scripts.json file.

Resources

• Hubot Documentation
• Slack Developer Kit for Hubot
• Slack API Test
• Testing Hubot Scripts

halbert's Issues

Hubot uses a deprecated version of Node

Hubot never moved on from Node v10 which was sunset 24 Apr 2018. As a result, this will need migrated to the new Pyton setup.