In this post we are going to learn how to install
hubot and make it work over
XMPP protocol (using an openfire server). We'll also see how it can help us in our daily work.
GitHub, Inc., wrote the first version of Hubot to automate our company chat room. Hubot knew how to deploy the site, automate a lot of tasks, and be a source of fun in the company. -- Github
Hubot is a robot which belongs to your chat infrastructure as one more user that you can talk to.
Hubot can help you automate a lot of tasks, like deploying a site, managing your
Pomodoro, or managing an issue tracking system.
Hubot is written in
CoffeScript on
Node.js, so keep in mind that
Hubot can be extended with
CoffeScript easily. In fact, the real fun happens when you
add your own scripts.
This post is written using
Ubuntu, so if you are using any other OS, you only have to modify the way components are installed.
First of all (I assume you have a
JVM installed), you must install
npm and
node.js. For this I have used
apt-get.
sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
Next you'l install
Hubot dependencies by running the next
apt-get command.
apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev git-core redis-server libexpat1-dev
Then we need to install
CoffeScript. So we can run the next command:
npm install -g coffee-script
And finally we are going to install
Hubot in
/opt directory. Obviously, it could be any other one.
cd /opt
git clone git://github.com/github/hubot.git && cd hubot
npm installalex@grumpy:/opt/hubot$ ./bin/hubotHubot> hubot ping
Hubot> PONG This will produce a
Pong message.
Now it is time to install Openfire server so we can communicate with Hubot using the XMPP protocol instead of shell. Of course you could choose any other XMPP server, but for now I'm using Openfire.
To install it, download it from openfire's site, and extract it to /opt directory.
tar -xzvf openfire_<version>.tar.gz
mv openfire /optA web-based wizard driven setup and configuration tool is built in Openfire, so let's start Openfire server for the first time and configure typical parameters like administrator username, server name, ...
$OPENFIRE_HOME/bin/openfire startThen log in as an admin and then create the first two users, developer and hubot. So go to Users/Groups -> Create New User, and fill in the required information for both users.
and finally we must disable TLS security, there is an issue between Openfire TLS version and node.js XMPP module so if you are using Openfire, you should disable it.
The next step is to check that the developer user has access to the hubot chatroom and check that the account is correctly configured. We can open our XMPP client (in our case Spark) but it should work with any other one and then verify that we can connect.
If you are using Spark, log in with the developer account and in the Actions menu you will find the Join Conference room option. Now choose the previously created room ( hubot) and confirm that you have configured the XMPP part correctly.
Now it is time for Hubot. First of all we are going to create a bot called my-bot:
alex@grumpy:/opt/hubot$ ./bin/hubot -c ./my-bot"dependencies": {
"hubot": "2.3.2",
"hubot-scripts": ">= 2.1.0",
"optparse": "1.0.3",
"node-xmpp": "0.3.2",
"hubot-xmpp": "0.1.0",
"htmlparser": "1.7.6",
"soupselect": "0.2.0",
"underscore": "1.3.3",
"underscore.string": "2.2.0rc"
}
Then before starting
Hubot, you must install the
XMPP adapter. Run
npm install from the
hubot directory, and an
XMPP extension will be installed into
hubot.
alex@grumpy:/opt/hubot/my-bot$ npm install
And now we are ready to start using
Hubot and
Openfire.
We are going to start by adding environment variables to configure the XMPP adapter.
We are going to start by adding environment variables to configure the XMPP adapter.
export HUBOT_XMPP_USERNAME=hubot@grumpy
export HUBOT_XMPP_PASSWORD=<password>
export HUBOT_XMPP_ROOMS=hubot Note that a
username should accompany yourr server name which in my case is
grumpy. And finally it is time to start
Hubot.
alex@grumpy:/opt/hubot/my-bot$ ./bin/hubot --adapter xmpp You will see your new friend in Spark (if you have already added
hubot as a friend).
And after you check that we can go to hubot-scripts to download and install the useful ones depending on our environment.
In this video you can see a screencast of Hubot In Action with some scripts that I use.
I hope you like Hubot!
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