A group project for learning and teaching via a real code base.
Fenders Bot aims to provide a place for people to get real world experience working with other members of Fenders Perth, by creating a bot to interact with the Fenders slack network.
The project is made to allow anyone to propose or implement a new feature and should allow people to learn new technologies or experiment with all areas of an application, such as:
- Frontend
- Backend
- Testing
- Visualizations
As well as providing a place for people to hone their code skills, it also provides people the ability to work with a team using modern tools such as GitHub issues and Pull Requests.
Fendersbot makes use of environment variables. Either set these manually or place them in a .env file in the projects root directory.
See .env.sample for required environment variables.
Test are written using Mocha in bdd style.
Tests can be run with npm test.
The following will provide a very high level idea of how the bot currently sits together and works. We are using the Botkit module for our core functionality. This project is set up as a Slack app, which means that we require the ability to handle installation in multiple teams and require a web server for auth endpoints.
The controller is in charge of creating bots, and a web server. The web server provides endpoints for Oauth and webhooks from Slack and this functionality is handled by Botkit for us.
The bot (created by the controller) is in charge with communicating with and posting to Slack. This includes any API calls, direct messages back to users, public responses etc. It will also connect to Slack's Real Time Messaging API to get events from slack channels in, you guessed it, real-time. This is the entry point for responses and events are fired on the bot for messages, replies etc.
A response, in our context, is a simple schema to listen for a message using a regular expression pattern and perform a bot action when a message matches that pattern. A response callback will receive the bot that is responsible for handling that response, and a message object from Slack. The message object looks like this:
{
"type": "message",
"channel": "C2147483705",
"user": "U2147483697",
"text": "Hello world",
"ts": "1355517523.000005"
}
You must have the correct permissions to deploy. We only deploy master when it is green. Master should always be green!
git checkout master
git pull origin master
git push heroku master