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dridbot

A.k.a. "Dr. ID" or just dri, is a chat bot built on the Hubot framework, useful for pepping up the experience for participants and organizers of hackathons that run on Dribdat.

🚧 Currently not actively maintained, due to (ha ha) time constraints 🚧

🤗 Chat with Aletsdat on HuggingFace, an A.I. hackathon assistant that incorporates the Dribdat guidelines 🤗

The bot currently has the following talents:

:+1: generating starter ideas

Using the latest techniques in algorithmic design fiction and an extensive database of killer app ideas, your next genius idea is a keystroke away.

:pig_nose: tracking your hacking

As a standalone tool or connected to } dribdat {, the world's most powerful open source hackathon analytics platform, this bot can give you insights before you even realise you need them.

:dancers: checking hacker news

The ultimate goal of any hackathon project is to land a top spot on Show HN, so we've incorporated it right into your team channel. Work hard and climb higher!

:eyes: searching for resources

Whether it's open source boilerplates to jump right into your coding, or open data resources for that real-world impact that impresses the jury, you are looking at the most advanced hackathon toolbox out there, period.

:green_apple: running healthier events

Last but not least, we are very conscious of hackathons sometimes having the reputation of a toxic environment. For your body, for your mind, for hackathons on- and off-line, we have a range of health advice built right in.

:point_up: The Pitch: watch this three minute video for a weird & wacky intro.

Developer notes

This project was initially generated by generator-hubot, and configured to be deployed on Heroku to get you up and running quickly.

Quickstart

This project can be deployed to any server capable of serving Node.js applications, for example in the Heroku cloud:

Deploy

You will be asked to enter the following variables:

Other Hubot tokens are available for connecting to other chat platforms. See below.

Running dridbot 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 dridbot locally by running:

npm run hubot

Or:

% 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
dridbot>

Then you can interact with dridbot by typing commands like dridbot help.

dridbot> dridbot help
dridbot help - Displays all of the help commands that dridbot 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.