sabondano/slacker

A pub/sub chat using Redis

Slacker

A pub/sub chat using Redis. Written as a tool for this lesson on server-side pub/sub.

Slacker provides a few simple ruby files for subscribing and publishing to redis channels.

It will look for an environment variable called SLACKER_REDIS when deciding which server to connect to. By default it will use the standard redis url (localhost:6379).

Group Exercise

For the group exercise, provide everyone with a shared,network-accessible redis url. One easy way to obtain a new redis url is to create a new heroku app (heroku create) and add the redistogo addon (heroku addons:create redistogo).

Once this is done, you can retrieve the newly created redis url by checking heroku config.

Once you have this URL, use it for your redis connections by sourcing it into the environment when running each file.

For example

SLACKER_REDIS=my-redis-to-go-url ruby publishers/talker.rb

Provided Scripts

Subscribers

• subscribers/listener.rb - Subscribes to "community" channel and prints messages to consol
• subscribers/logger.rb - Subs to "community" and logs messages to log.txt
• subscribers/whisper.rb - Subs to "community" and forwards messages to a slack integration

Note The whisper.rb slack integration requires a SLACKER_WEBHOOK ENV variable, which needs to contain the ID of the "bean-spiller" slack integration.

This is an incoming webhook in the slack API which accepts messages and posts them to Turing's super-secret slack channel.

Authorized slack users can retrieve the appropriate token from this slack page

Publishers

• publishers/talker.rb - Simple message input REPL - gives a command prompt and sends any input to "community" redis channel
• publishers/webber.rb - Sinatra-based web UI for taking messages via a form and posting them to the redis channel