HospitalBot

HospitalBot is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework and used to improve communication in HospitalRun Slack's workspace.

It was initially generated by generator-hubot, and configured to be
deployed on Heroku to get you up and running as quick as possible.
This README is intended to help get you started. Definitely update and improve
to talk about your own instance, how to use and deploy, what functionality is
available, etc!

Running hospitalbot Locally

You can test your hubot by running the following, however some plugins will not
behave as expected unless the environment variables they rely
upon have been set.

You can start hospitalbot locally by running:

% bin/hubot

You'll see some start up output and a prompt:

[Sat Feb 28 2015 12:38:27 GMT+0000 (GMT)] INFO Using default redis on localhost:6379
hospitalbot>

Then you can interact with hospitalbot by typing hospitalbot help.

hospitalbot> hospitalbot help
hospitalbot animate me <query> - The same thing as `image me`, except adds [snip]
hospitalbot help - Displays all of the help commands that hospitalbot knows about.
...

Configuration

A few scripts (including some installed by default) require environment
variables to be set as a simple form of configuration.

Each script should have a commented header which contains a "Configuration"
section that explains which values it requires to be placed in which variable.
When you have lots of scripts installed this process can be quite labour
intensive. The following shell command can be used as a stop gap until an
easier way to do this has been implemented.

grep -o 'hubot-[a-z0-9_-]\+' external-scripts.json, \
  xargs -n1 -I {} sh -c 'sed -n "/^# Configuration/,/^#$/ s/^/{} /p" \
      $(find node_modules/{}/ -name "*.coffee")', \
    awk -F '#' '{ printf "%-25s %s\n", $1, $2 }'

How to set environment variables will be specific to your operating system.
Rather than recreate the various methods and best practices in achieving this,
it's suggested that you search for a dedicated guide focused on your OS.

Scripting

An example script is included at scripts/example.coffee, so check it out to
get started, along with the Scripting Guide.

For many common tasks, there's a good chance someone has already one to do just
the thing.

external-scripts

There will inevitably be functionality that everyone will want. Instead of
writing it yourself, you can use existing plugins.

Hubot is able to load plugins from third-party npm packages. This is the
recommended way to add functionality to your hubot. You can get a list of
available hubot plugins on npmjs.com or by using npm search:

% npm search hubot-scripts panda
NAME             DESCRIPTION                        AUTHOR DATE       VERSION KEYWORDS
hubot-pandapanda a hubot script for panda responses =missu 2014-11-30 0.9.2   hubot hubot-scripts panda
...

To use a package, check the package's documentation, but in general it is:

1. Use npm install --save to add the package to package.json and install it
2. Add the package name to external-scripts.json as a double quoted string

You can review external-scripts.json to see what is included by default.

Advanced Usage

It is also possible to define external-scripts.json as an object to
explicitly specify which scripts from a package should be included. The example
below, for example, will only activate two of the six available scripts inside
the hubot-fun plugin, but all four of those in hubot-auto-deploy.

{
  "hubot-fun": ["crazy", "thanks"],
  "hubot-auto-deploy": "*"
}

Be aware that not all plugins support this usage and will typically fallback
to including all scripts.

hubot-scripts

Before hubot plugin packages were adopted, most plugins were held in the
hubot-scripts package. Some of these plugins have yet to be
migrated to their own packages. They can still be used but the setup is a bit
different.

To enable scripts from the hubot-scripts package, add the script name with
extension as a double quoted string to the hubot-scripts.json file in this
repo.

Persistence

If you are going to use the hubot-redis-brain package (strongly suggested),
you will need to add the Redis to Go addon on Heroku which requires a verified
account or you can create an account at Redis to Go and manually
set the REDISTOGO_URL variable.

% heroku config:add REDISTOGO_URL="..."

If you don't need any persistence feel free to remove the hubot-redis-brain
from external-scripts.json and you don't need to worry about redis at all.

Adapters

Adapters are the interface to the service you want your hubot to run on, such
as Campfire or IRC. There are a number of third party adapters that the
community have contributed. Check Hubot Adapters for the
available ones.

If you would like to run a non-Campfire or shell adapter you will need to add
the adapter package as a dependency to the package.json file in the
dependencies section.

Once you've added the dependency with npm install --save to install it you
can then run hubot with the adapter.

% bin/hubot -a <adapter>

Where <adapter> is the name of your adapter without the hubot- prefix.

Deployment

% heroku create --stack cedar
% git push heroku master

If your Heroku account has been verified you can run the following to enable
and add the Redis to Go addon to your app.

% heroku addons:add redistogo:nano

If you run into any problems, checkout Heroku's docs.

You'll need to edit the Procfile to set the name of your hubot.

More detailed documentation can be found on the deploying hubot onto
Heroku wiki page.

Deploying to UNIX or Windows

If you would like to deploy to either a UNIX operating system or Windows.
Please check out the deploying hubot onto UNIX and deploying
hubot onto Windows wiki pages.

Campfire Variables

If you are using the Campfire adapter you will need to set some environment
variables. If not, refer to your adapter documentation for how to configure it,
links to the adapters can be found on Hubot Adapters.

Create a separate Campfire user for your bot and get their token from the web
UI.

% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_TOKEN="..."

Get the numeric IDs of the rooms you want the bot to join, comma delimited. If
you want the bot to connect to https://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com/room/42
and https://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com/room/1024 then you'd add it like
this:

% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_ROOMS="42,1024"

Add the subdomain hubot should connect to. If you web URL looks like
http://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com then you'd add it like this:

% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_ACCOUNT="mysubdomain"

Restart the bot

You may want to get comfortable with heroku logs and heroku restart if
you're having issues.