Acrobot

Acrobot is a Slack chatbot, with the aim of keeping track of acronyms used within Red Hat.

Usage

Acrobot is capable of multiple actions:

Getting an acronym explanation: acronym
Saving an acronym: !acronym = explanation
Modifying an acronym explanation: !acronym = explanation => new explanation
Removing an acronym explanation: !acronym = explanation =>

Whitespace between parts of commands does not matter. Thus, !TEST=An explanation. and ! TEST = An explanation. are equivalent, but !TE ST = An explanation. is distinct from both.

If you are interacting with acrobot in a room, do not forget to tag the bot, e.g. @Acrobot !acronym = explanation. This is not necessary in a direct message with the bot.

You can only change or remove an explanation that you have added.

Architecture

Acrobot is a simple application, using:

Java (tested against OpenJDK 21)
Hibernate
MySQL
The Slack Bolt API

Before running the application, you will need to create a Slack application. The app requires the following API features:

Socket mode (to avoid needing to expose a URL for Slack to use)
The following scopes:
- app_mentions:read: to receive messages in which the bot is mentioned
- chat:write: to respond to messages
- im:history: to read DMs sent to the bot
The following event subscriptions:
- app_mention: to receive messages in which the bot is mentioned
- message.im: to receive DMs sent to the bot

An example App Manifest is provided.

For more details on setting up the bot, see the Google Developer's documentation.

Configuration

Acrobot is configured using environment variables:

SLACK_APP_TOKEN: the Slack application's "app-level token", which can be found in Settings > Basic Information > App-Level Tokens in the application configuration (on https://api.slack.com/apps/).
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: the Slack application's OAuth token, starting with xapp-, which can be found in Features > OAuth & Permissions > OAuth Tokens for Your Workspace.
ACROBOT_DB_URL: the JDBC URL used for storing data (e.g. jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/acrobot, for the database acrobot on the MySQL server hosted at localhost on port 3306).
ACROBOT_DB_USER: the username used to authenticate to the database.
ACROBOT_DB_PASS: the username used to authenticate to the database.

Testing

Acrobot contains unit tests with an in-memory H2 database. You should execute all tests before pushing new code. You can build and test the program using ./gradlew build.

All new features should have tests.

Credits

Author: Janet Cobb