/slackbot-rubydoc

Slack bot for providing ruby documentation from ri CLI tool

Primary LanguageRuby

slackbot-rubydoc Build Status Code Climate

Slack bot for providing ruby documentation from ri CLI tool

How to start using bot

IMPORTANT: You need to have ruby installed on your machine. You also should have ruby docs generated.

  1. Please clone the repository.
  2. Go to cloned directory and run:
script/setup
==> Installing gem dependencies…
==> Bot is now ready to start! :)

  1. Please add environment variable SLACK_BOT_TOKEN with your token assigned to it.

  2. Then you are ready to start the bot:

script/server
==> Installing gem dependencies…
==> Bot started watching the Slack

How to communicate with bot from Slack ?

I've used direct message approach (but it can be easily upgraded):

# direct message command

> user [9:22 AM] 
> Array#first

> docbot BOT [9:22 AM]
> # Array#first
> ...

About code design

Application is written with Single Responsibility in mind and TRUE heuristic (Sandi Metz rules). Code starts in run.rb file.

run.rb is responsible for knowing what to instantiate. I use Dependency Injection and aggregation approach. In run.rb I inject all stuff to main execution object "Client::Fye" which is responsible for running proper steps in #start method.

In general in start method there is connection to Slack's websocket opened and two event listeners are added "on message from websocket" and "on close of websocket connection". When message is retrieved from websocket then bot is analyzing and extracts the content from ri, responding according to results.

Classes have corresponding tests in spec directory. To run tests please type (being in app's directory):

script/test

Short description about directories in lib:

  • bot - contains bot classes and bot related stuff like parameter object class
  • client - this directory contains client code: in this case this is websocket client - so it communicates with websocket (request and response)
  • config - contains config class to fetch config data
  • http_communication - contains stuff to communicate with http eg: to get content from external url

Bot functionality can be easily extended. New bots can be easily added by extending Bot::Base class. New bot can be easily injected to client and introduce new functionality.

I was also thinking about creating modules with commands for bots. So we could easily include multiple modules to bot class and this way we can build bots who understand more (so bot can easily responds to "Hi!", "Hello!" etc and having in the same time another module responsible for ri DOC) 😉 <-- but this is idea for evolution of this software.

About dependencies I had used

One of the goals is to not use lot of external dependencies. The easiest way is to just use https://github.com/dblock/slack-ruby-bot but it has lot of external dependencies like ActiveSupport etc. On the other hand if we can live with that dependencies I recommend to use this gem as it works really nice and is easy in implementation and is actively developed and supported. My bot from lib/bot is reusable and also works nice with slack-ruby-bot gem. 😉

Ok, I did some job to not use slack-ruby-bot and I'm using faye-websocket to communicate with websocket just to not reinvent the wheel and do not write all the websocket communication code on my own 😛 (to keep healthy balance between what to use as dependency and what to write on my own). Faye-websocket provides nice interface for websocket client and is based on battle-tested library EventMachine. Other dependencies I use are of course:

  • rake
  • rspec