Middleman

Matrix bot to act as a middleman. Useful as a feedback bot or for support purposes.

Features:

Messages to bot are relayed to management room
Management room users can reply by replying to the messages prefixing with !reply
Sender messages can be configured as anonymous
Configurable welcome message when bot is invited to a room
Users in the management room can write to rooms the bot is in via the !message command

Running

Best used with Docker, find images on Docker Hub.

An example configuration file is provided as sample.config.yaml.

Make a copy of that, edit as required and mount it to /config/config.yaml on the Docker container.

You'll also need to give the container a folder for storing state. Create a folder, ensure it's writable by the user the container process is running as and mount it to /data.

Example:

cp sample.config.yaml config.yaml
# Edit config.yaml, see the file for details
mkdir data
docker run -v ${PWD}/config.docker.yaml:/config/config.yaml:ro \
    -v ${PWD}/data:/data --name middleman elokapinaorg/middleman

Usage

The configured management room is the room that all messages Middleman receives in other rooms will be relayed to.

Normal discussion can happen in the management room. The bot will send out messages in two cases:

Replies prefixed with !reply will be relayed back to the room the message came from.
Messages prefixed with !message <room ID or alias> will be sent to the room given.

For example: !message #foobar:domain.tld Hello world would send out "Hello world".

Currently, messages relayed between the rooms are limited to plain text. Images and other non-text messages will not currently be relayed either way.

Development

If you need help or want to otherwise chat, jump to #middleman:elokapina.fi!

Dependencies

Create a Python 3.8+ virtualenv
Do pip install -U pip setuptools pip-tools
Do pip-sync

To update dependencies, do NOT edit requirements.txt directly. Any changes go into requirements.in and then you run pip-compile. If you want to upgrade existing non-pinned (in requirements.in) dependencies, run pip-compile --upgrade, keeping the ones that you want to update in requirements.txt when commiting. See more info about pip-tools at https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools

Releasing

Update CHANGELOG.md
Commit changelog
Make a tag
Push the tag
Make a GitHub release, copy the changelog for the release there
Build a docker image
- docker build . -t elokapinaorg/middleman:v<version>
- docker tag elokapinaorg/middleman:v<version> elokapinaorg/middleman:latest
Push docker images
Update topic in #middleman:elokapina.fi
Consider announcing on #thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org \o/

License

Apache2

#middleman:elokapina.fi room photo from here.