Hedwig HipChat Adapter

A HipChat Adapter for Hedwig, based on Hedwig XMPP

Getting started

Let's generate a new Elixir application with a supervision tree:

λ mix new alfred --sup
* creating README.md
* creating .gitignore
* creating mix.exs
* creating config
* creating config/config.exs
* creating lib
* creating lib/alfred.ex
* creating test
* creating test/test_helper.exs
* creating test/alfred_test.exs

Your Mix project was created successfully.
You can use "mix" to compile it, test it, and more:

    cd alfred
    mix test

Run "mix help" for more commands.

Change into our new application directory:

λ cd alfred

Add hedwig_hipchat to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [{:exml, github: "paulgray/exml", override: true},
   {:hedwig_hipchat, "~> 0.9.0"}]
end

Ensure hedwig_hipchat is started before your application:

def application do
  [applications: [:hedwig_hipchat]]
end

Generate our robot

λ mix deps.get
λ mix hedwig.gen.robot

Welcome to the Hedwig Robot Generator!

Let's get started.

What would you like to name your bot?: alfred

Available adapters

1. Hedwig.Adapters.HipChat
2. Hedwig.Adapters.Console
3. Hedwig.Adapters.Test

Please select an adapter: 1

* creating lib/alfred
* creating lib/alfred/robot.ex
* updating config/config.exs

Don't forget to add your new robot to your supervision tree
(typically in lib/alfred.ex):

    worker(Alfred.Robot, [])

Supervise our robot

We'll want Alfred to be supervised and started when we start our application. Let's add it to our supervision tree. Open up lib/alfred.ex and add the following to the children list:

worker(Alfred.Robot, [])

Configuration

The next thing we need to do is configure our bot for our HipChat server. Open up config/config.exs and let's take a look at what was generated for us:

use Mix.Config

config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
  adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.HipChat,
  name: "alfred",
  aka: "/",
  responders: [
    {Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.GreatSuccess, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.ShipIt, []}
  ]

So we have the adapter, name, aka, and responders set. The adapter is the module responsible for handling all of the HipChat details like connecting and sending and receiving messages over the network. The name is the name that our bot will respond to, and must be the bot account's full name, exactly as registered in HipChat. The aka (also known as) field is optional, but it allows us to address our bot with an alias. By default, this alias is set to /; we'll need to change that (since / is used by the HipChat client), so we'll use ! instead.

Finally we have responders. Responders are modules that provide functions that match on the messages that get sent to our bot. We'll discuss this further in a bit.

We'll need to provide a few more things in order for us to connect to our HipChat server. We'll need to provide our bot's jid and password as well as a list of rooms we want our bot to join once connected.

To find out your HipChat jid, go to https://your_org.hipchat.com/account/xmpp, log in as the bot, and see Account info / Jabber ID.

On the same page you'll see the available rooms; combine the XMPP/Jabber name with the Account info / Conference (MUC) domain so that you get a full JID, like "12345_some_room@conf.hipchat.com".

Let's see what this could look like:

use Mix.Config

config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
  adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.HipChat,
  # HipChat is particular about using our registered name, exactly as is
  name: "Alfred",
  # we needed to change this, remember?
  aka: "!",
  # this is the Jabber ID from hipchat
  jid: "12345_123456@chat.hipchat.com",
  # fill in the appropriate password for your bot
  password: "password",
  rooms: [
    # fill in the appropriate rooms for your HipChat server
    {"12345_some_room@conf.hipchat.com", []}
  ],
  responders: [
    {Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.GreatSuccess, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.ShipIt, []}
  ]

Great! We're ready to start our bot. From the root of our application, let's run the following:

λ mix run --no-halt

This will start our application along with our bot. Our bot should connect to the server and join the configured room(s). From there, we can connect with our favourite HipChat client and begin sending messages to our bot.

Since we have the Help responder installed, we can say Alfred help (or the shorter version using our aka, !help) and we should see a list of usage for all of the installed responders.

What's next?

Well, that's it for now. Make sure to read the Hedwig Documentation for more details on writing responders and other exciting things!

LICENSE

Hedwig HipChat source code is licensed under the MIT License.