Basil - /'ba-zəl/

A skype bot hoping to be as cool as phrik and as useful as hubot.

Why skype, and not IRC?

We use skype at work the way I've always used IRC for FOSS projects. It's a place for support, meetings, fire-drills, and just hanging out.

For any bot to be useful for us, he would have to live there.

Why not fork hubot?

I wanted it to be in ruby

This way, all my coworkers can tinker with him too. It also made the skype integration easy by way of nfelger's gem.

It's not a very big wheel to reinvent

The heart of basil is tiny. This is not including the skype server and plugins which would've been written for a hubot fork anyway.

Hubot's not that special

He's great, amazing, popular -- but he's not the first chat bot to be written or the only one in wide-use today.

Besides, I found this project interesting and fun to do from scratch.

Usage

Since basil relies on a skype gem only available on github, current usage relies on bundler and running from source.

git clone https://github.com/pbrisbin/basil && cd basil
cp config/example.yml config/basil.yml # and adjust
bundle install
./bin/basil

requires ruby 1.9 and the Skype setup is linux-only

Skype

The skype client must be running under a profile to represent the bot. Messages to the bot must be prefixed correctly (unless in private chat) so he knows to respond.

None of this is required when using server_type: :cli.

Plugins

Writing plugins should be both easy and powerful. Here are some examples of the sorts of things plugins can do:

Respond to a simple command with a canned reply

# works best with 'give'
Basil.respond_to('beer') {

  replies "someone wanted you to have this (beer)" # skype emoticon

}

Note: the String 'beer' is interpreted as /^beer$/ by the constructor

These types of plugins have been removed since they can be implemented using the new factoid plugin.

Respond cleverly using the trigger's content

Basil.respond_to(/^call me a (.*)/) {

  says "fine, you're a #{@match_data[1]}."

}

Make a simple web request

Basil.respond_to(/^g(oogle)? (.*)/) {

  url = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=#{escape(@match_data[2])}"

  if result = get_json(url)['responseData']['results'].first rescue nil
    replies "#{result['titleNoFormatting']}: #{result['unescapedUrl']}"
  else
    replies "Nothing found."
  end

}.description = 'consults the almighty google'

Note: since constructors return self, you can easily chain a method on the end, like assigning a description (which is used by help)

Do some not-so-simple web stuff

(The rest of these are longish so I won't reproduce them here.)

[plugins/jira.rb] (https://github.com/pbrisbin/basil/blob/master/plugins/jira.rb) [plugins/jenkins.rb] (https://github.com/pbrisbin/basil/blob/master/plugins/jenkins.rb)

tomasv/basil