Team Bot

This bot connects your team to the outside and makes it addressable.

Configure this bot with your team address (e.g. helpdesk@example.org), and add all your team members to the crew. Then, every time an outsider writes to your team address, the bot opens a new relay group with all of you; you can use the relay group to discuss the request in private and when you have come to a conclusion, answer the request. The bot will forward the answer to the outsider in the name of the team, hiding the identities of the team members.

Setup

To install this bot, run:

git clone https://github.com/deltachat-bot/team-bot
cd team-bot
pip install .

Now you can configure it with an email address you want to use as a team:

team-bot init --email helpdesk@example.org --password p455w0rD

This command will show a QR code; scan it with Delta Chat to become part of the "team", the verified group which manages the Team Bot.

Now to run it, simply execute:

team-bot run -v

The bot only works as long as this command is running. Read more about running bots on bots.delta.chat.

Deploy with pyinfra

If you use pyinfra to manage a server, you can deploy this bot with it. Just import it into your deploy.py file like this:

from team_bot.pyinfra import deploy_team_bot

deploy_team_bot(
    unix_user='root',                   # an existing UNIX user (doesn't need root or sudo privileges)
    bot_email='helpdesk@example.org',   # the email address your team wants to use
    bot_passwd='p4ssw0rd',              # the password to the email account
)

After you deployed it, you need to do two steps manually:

First, to initialize the bot, create the crew, and join the crew, login to the user with ssh and run:

export $(cat ~/.env | xargs) && ~/.local/lib/team-bot.venv/bin/team-bot init

Then, to start the bot and keep it running in the background, run:

systemctl --user enable --now team-bot

You can view the log output with journalctl --user -fu team-bot to confirm that it works.

Development Environment

To get started with developing, run:

python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[dev]
tox