Documentation: For the Hubot n00b

[samhavens]

As a user new to Hubot, I am unsure: how to get started, run and host this, how to connect it to e.g. Slack, and what I can do with it. It seems really cool though! I'm happy to help with documentation if you can lead me through the process.

[leonardochaia]

Hi Sam, I've developed this little project in order to be able to code a Hubot bot with Typescript and DI. Be aware that I'm not using this in production, although I would, I just don't have any bots now. Besides I don't know anyone using it, so yeah, there are no docs either, all there is is the readme.

In order to get started, you'll use a Yeoman generator to scaffold a new project. First you need to install the generator using: (if you're not using yarn, replace with proper npm command, or install yarn)

yarn global add yo generator-hubular

Then you can scaffold a new project with:

yo hubular

It will ask you a couple of question about the new bot, and once it finishes you should have a working Hubot bot. I recommend you select the shell adapter for play testing, you can afterwards change it to use Slack.

Once the command finishes, you can start the hubot bot using

yarn start

It will open a console where you can chat to the bot, you can test connection by saying <botname> ping

HUBOT> hubot ping
HUBOT > PONG

Check the readme added to your project for more startup examples.

To use the Slack adapter:

yarn add hubot-slack

Change the adapter in hubular.json to slack

Create a .env file to provide slack environment variables. Hubular with load this file for you.

I've not tested this with Slack, but same guides should apply.

To host this in production, you can use Docker. Here's a Dockerfile and compose example:

FROM node:alpine

# ENV NODE_ENV=production

RUN mkdir -p /code

WORKDIR /code

COPY ./package.json ./yarn.lock ./

RUN yarn install

COPY external-scripts.json tsconfig.json hubular.json ./
COPY ./scripts ./scripts

COPY ./src ./src

RUN yarn build

EXPOSE 8080

CMD yarn build && yarn hubular

version: '2'

services:
  hubot:
    build:
      context: ./
    volumes:
      - ./scripts:/code/scripts
      - ./src:/code/src
      # - ./hubular-scripts:/code/hubular-scripts
    environment:
      HUBOT_LOG_LEVEL: debug

I'm happy to help you if you need further help. If you'd like to fix anything, or add docs, I'd welcome any PRs.