slackscot

README

• Overview
• Requirements
• Features
• Demo
• The Name
• Concepts
• Create Your Own Slackscot
  • Assembling the Parts and Bringing Your slackscot to Life
  • Configuration Example
  • Creating Your Own Plugins
• Contributing
• Some Credits

Overview

Slackscot is a slack bot core written in Go. Think of it as the assembly kit to making your own friendly slack bot. It comes with a set of plugins you might enjoy and a friendly API for you to realize your ambitious dreams (if you dreams include this sort of thing).

Requirements

Go 1.11 or above is required, mostly for go module support.

Features

• Support for reactions to message updates. slackscot does the following:

  • Keeps track of plugin action responses and the message that triggered them

  • On message updates:

    1. Update responses for each triggered action

    2. Delete responses that aren't triggering anymore (or result in errors during the message update)

  • On deletion of triggering messages, responses are also deleted

  • Limitation: Sending a message automatically splits it into multiple slack messages when it's too long. When updating messages, this spitting doesn't happen and results in an message too long error. Effectively, the last message in the initial response might get deleted as a result. Handling of this could be better but that is the current limitation 😕

• Support for threaded replies to user message with option to also broadcast on channels (disabled by default). See configuration example below where both are enabled.

  • Plugin actions may also explicitely reply in threads with/without broadcasting via AnswerOption

• Simple extensible storage API for persistence in two flavors: StringStorer and BytesStorer. Both are basic key:value maps. A default file-based implementation is provided backed by leveldb

• Support for various configuration sources/formats via viper

• Support for various ways to implement functionality:

  1. scheduled actions: run something every second, minute, hour, week. Oh Monday is a plugin that demos this by sending a Monday greeting every Monday at 10am (or the time you configure it to).
  2. commands: respond to a command directed at your slackscot. That means something like @slackscot help or a direct message help sent to slackscot.
  3. hear actions (aka "listeners"): actions that evaluated for a match on every message that slackscot hears. You'll want to make sure your Match function isn't too heavy. An example is the "famous" finger quoter plugin

• Testing functions to help validate plugin action behavior (see example in triggerer_test.go). Testing functions are found in assertaction and assertanswer

• Built-in help plugin supporting a decently formatted help message as a command listing all plugins' actions. If you'd like some actions to not be shown in the help, you can set Hidden to true in its ActionDefinition (especially useful for hear actions)

• The plugin interface as a logical grouping of one or many commands and hear actions and/or scheduled actions

• Support for injected services providing plugins easy access to an optionally caching user info and a logger.

Demo

• slackscot deleting a triggered reaction after seeing a message updated that caused the first action to not trigger anymore and a new action to now trigger (it makes sense when you see it)

• slackscot updating a triggered reaction after seeing a triggering message being updated

• slackscot deleting a reaction after seeing the triggering message being deleted

• slackscot threaded replies enabled (with broadcast => on)

The Name

The first concrete bot implementation using this code was youppi, named after the great mascot of the Montreal Expos and, when the Expos left Montreal, the Montreal Canadiens.

Slackscot is a variation on the expected theme of slackbot with the implication that this is the core to more than just a regular bot. You know, a friendly company mascot that hangs out on your slack.

Concepts

• Commands: commands are well-defined actions with a format. Slackscot handles all direct messages as implicit commands as well as @mention <command> on channels. Responses to commands are directed to the person who invoked it.

• Hear actions: those are listeners that can potentially match on any message sent on channels that slackscot is a member of. This can include actions that will randomly generate a response. Note that responses are not automatically directed to the person who authored the message triggering the response (although an implementation is free to use the user id of the triggering message if desired).

Create Your Own Slackscot

Slackscot provides the pieces to make your mascot but you'll have to assemble them for him/her to come alive. The easiest to get started is to look at a real example: youppi.

The godoc is also a good reference especially if you're looking to implement something like a new implementation of the storer interfaces.

Assembling the Parts and Bringing Your slackscot to Life

Here's an example of how youppi does it (apologies for the verbose and repetitive error handling when creating instances of plugins but it looks worse than it is):

package main

import (
	"github.com/alexandre-normand/slackscot"
	"github.com/alexandre-normand/slackscot/config"
	"github.com/alexandre-normand/slackscot/plugins"
	"github.com/alexandre-normand/slackscot/store"
	"github.com/spf13/viper"
	"gopkg.in/alecthomas/kingpin.v2"
	"log"
	"os"
)

var (
	configurationPath = kingpin.Flag("configuration", "The path to the configuration file.").Required().String()
	logfile           = kingpin.Flag("log", "The path to the log file").OpenFile(os.O_RDWR|os.O_CREATE|os.O_APPEND, 0666)
)

const (
	storagePathKey = "storagePath" // Root directory for the file-based leveldb storage
	name           = "youppi"
)

func main() {
	kingpin.Version(VERSION)
	kingpin.Parse()

	v := config.NewViperWithDefaults()
	// Enable getting configuration from the environment, especially useful for the slack token
	v.AutomaticEnv()
	// Bind the token key config to the env variable SLACK_TOKEN (case sensitive)
	v.BindEnv(config.TokenKey, "SLACK_TOKEN")

	v.SetConfigFile(*configurationPath)
	err := v.ReadInConfig()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error loading configuration file [%s]: %v", *configurationPath, err)
	}

	// Do this only so that we can get a global debug flag available to everything
	viper.Set(config.DebugKey, v.GetBool(config.DebugKey))

	options := make([]slackscot.Option, 0)
	if *logfile != nil {
		options = append(options, slackscot.OptionLogfile(*logfile))
	}

	youppi, err := slackscot.NewSlackscot("youppi", v, options...)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	if !v.IsSet(storagePathKey) {
		log.Fatalf("Missing [%s] configuration key in the top value configuration", storagePathKey)
	}

	storagePath := v.GetString(storagePathKey)
	strStorer, err := store.NewLevelDB(name, storagePath)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Opening [%s] db failed with path [%s]", name, storagePath)
	}
	defer strStorer.Close()

	karma := plugins.NewKarma(strStorer)
	youppi.RegisterPlugin(&karma.Plugin)

	fingerQuoterConf, err := config.GetPluginConfig(v, plugins.FingerQuoterPluginName)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error initializing finger quoter plugin: %v", err)
	}
	fingerQuoter, err := plugins.NewFingerQuoter(fingerQuoterConf)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error initializing finger quoter plugin: %v", err)
	}
	youppi.RegisterPlugin(&fingerQuoter.Plugin)

	emojiBannerConf, err := config.GetPluginConfig(v, plugins.EmojiBannerPluginName)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error initializing emoji banner plugin: %v", err)
	}
	emojiBanner, err := plugins.NewEmojiBannerMaker(emojiBannerConf)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error initializing emoji banner plugin: %v", err)
	}
	defer emojiBanner.Close()
	youppi.RegisterPlugin(&emojiBanner.Plugin)

	ohMondayConf, err := config.GetPluginConfig(v, plugins.OhMondayPluginName)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error initializing oh monday plugin: %v", err)
	}
	ohMonday, err := plugins.NewOhMonday(ohMondayConf)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error initializing oh monday plugin: %v", err)
	}
	youppi.RegisterPlugin(&ohMonday.Plugin)

	versioner := plugins.NewVersioner("youppi", VERSION)
	youppi.RegisterPlugin(&versioner.Plugin)

	err = youppi.Run()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

Configuration Example

You'll also need to define your configuration for the core, used built-in plugins and any configuration required by your own custom plugins (not shown here). Slackscot uses viper for loading configuration which means that you are free to use a different file format (yaml, toml, env variables, etc.) as desired.

{
   "token": "your-slack-bot-token",
   "debug": false,
   "responseCacheSize": 5000,
   "timeLocation": "America/Los_Angeles",
   "storagePath": "/your-path-to-bot-home",
   "replyBehavior": {
      "threadedReplies": true,
      "broadcast": true
   },
   "plugins": {
      "ohMonday": {
   	     "channelIDs": ["slackChannelId"]
      },
      "fingerQuoter": {
         "frequency": "100",
         "channelIDs": []
      },
      "emojiBanner": {
         "figletFontUrl": "http://www.figlet.org/fonts/banner.flf"
      }
   }
}

Creating Your Own Plugins

It might be best to look at examples in this repo to guide you through it:

• The simplest plugin with a single command is the versioner
• One example of scheduled actions is oh monday
• One example of a mix of hear actions / commands that also uses the store api for persistence is the karma

Contributing

1. Fork it (preferrably, outside the GOPATH as per the new go modules guidelines)
2. Make your changes, commit them (don't forget to go build ./... and go test ./...) and push your branch to your fork
3. Open a PR and fill in the template (you don't have to but I'd appreciate context)
4. Check the code climate and travis PR builds. You might have to fix things and there's no shame if you do. I probably won't merge something that doesn't pass CI build but I'm willing to help to get it to pass 🖖.

Some Credits

slackscot uses Norberto Lopes's Slack API Integration found at https://github.com/nlopes/slack. The core functionality of the bot is previously used James Bowman's Slack RTM API integration and was heavily inspired by talbot, also written by James Bowman.

Documentation

Overview

Package slackscot provides the building blocks to create a slack bot. It is easily extendable via plugins that can combine commands, hear actions (listeners) as well as scheduled actions. It also supports updating of triggered responses on message updates as well as deleting triggered responses when the triggering messages are deleted by users.

Index

• Constants
• func AnswerInThread() func(sendOpts map[string]string)
• func AnswerInThreadWithBroadcast() func(sendOpts map[string]string)
• func AnswerInThreadWithoutBroadcast() func(sendOpts map[string]string)
• func AnswerWithoutThreading() func(sendOpts map[string]string)
• func ApplyAnswerOpts(opts ...AnswerOption) (sendOptions map[string]string)
• func NewSLogger(log *log.Logger, debug bool) (l *sLogger)
• func OptionLog(logger *log.Logger) func(*Slackscot)
• func OptionLogfile(logfile *os.File) func(*Slackscot)
• type ActionDefinition
• type ActionDefinitionWithID
• type Answer
• type AnswerOption
• type Answerer
• type IncomingMessage
• type Matcher
• type Option
• type OutgoingMessage
• type Plugin
• type RealTimeMessageSender
• type SLogger
• type ScheduledAction
• type ScheduledActionDefinition
• type SlackMessageID
• type Slackscot
  • func NewSlackscot(name string, v *viper.Viper, options ...Option) (s *Slackscot, err error)
  • func (s *Slackscot) RegisterPlugin(p *Plugin)
  • func (s *Slackscot) Run() (err error)
• type UserInfoFinder
  • func NewCachingUserInfoFinder(v *viper.Viper, loader UserInfoFinder, logger SLogger) (uf UserInfoFinder, err error)

Constants

const (
	ThreadedReplyOpt = "threadedReply"
	BroadcastOpt     = "broadcast"
)

const (
	// VERSION represents the current slackscot version
	VERSION = "1.8.0"
)

GENERATED and MANAGED by giddyup (https://github.com/alexandre-normand/giddyup)

Functions

func AnswerInThread

func AnswerInThread() func(sendOpts map[string]string)

AnswerInThread sets threaded replying

func AnswerInThreadWithBroadcast

func AnswerInThreadWithBroadcast() func(sendOpts map[string]string)

AnswerInThreadWithBroadcast sets threaded replying with broadcast enabled

func AnswerInThreadWithoutBroadcast

func AnswerInThreadWithoutBroadcast() func(sendOpts map[string]string)

AnswerInThreadWithoutBroadcast sets threaded replying with broadcast disabled

func AnswerWithoutThreading

func AnswerWithoutThreading() func(sendOpts map[string]string)

AnswerWithoutThreading

func ApplyAnswerOpts

func ApplyAnswerOpts(opts ...AnswerOption) (sendOptions map[string]string)

ApplyAnswerOpts applies answering options to build the send configuration

func NewSLogger

func NewSLogger(log *log.Logger, debug bool) (l *sLogger)

NewSLogger creates a new Slackscot logger provided with an interface logger and a debug flag

func OptionLog

func OptionLog(logger *log.Logger) func(*Slackscot)

OptionLog sets a logger for Slackscot

func OptionLogfile

func OptionLogfile(logfile *os.File) func(*Slackscot)

OptionLogfile sets a logfile for Slackscot while using the other default logging prefix and options

Types

type ActionDefinition

type ActionDefinition struct {
	// Indicates whether the action should be omitted from the help message
	Hidden bool

	// Matcher that will determine whether or not the action should be triggered
	Match Matcher

	// Usage example
	Usage string

	// Help description for the action
	Description string

	// Function to execute if the Matcher matches
	Answer Answerer
}

ActionDefinition represents how an action is triggered, published, used and described along with defining the function defining its behavior

type ActionDefinitionWithID

type ActionDefinitionWithID struct {
	ActionDefinition
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

ActionDefinitionWithID holds an action definition along with its identifier string

type Answer

type Answer struct {
	Text string

	// Options to apply when sending a message
	Options []AnswerOption
}

Answer holds data of an Action's Answer: namely, its text and options to use when delivering it

type AnswerOption

type AnswerOption func(sendOpts map[string]string)

AnswerOption defines a function applied to Answers

type Answerer

type Answerer func(m *IncomingMessage) *Answer

Answerer is what gets executed when an ActionDefinition is triggered

type IncomingMessage

type IncomingMessage struct {
	// The original slack.Msg text stripped from the "<@Mention>" prefix, if applicable
	NormalizedText string
	slack.Msg
}

IncomingMessage holds data for an incoming slack message. In addition to a slack.Msg, it also has a normalized text that is the original text stripped from the "<@Mention>" prefix when a message is addressed to a slackscot instance. Since commands are usually received either via direct message (without @Mention) or on channels with @Mention, the normalized text is useful there to allow plugins to have a single version to do Match and Answer against

type Matcher

type Matcher func(m *IncomingMessage) bool

Matcher is the function that determines whether or not an action should be triggered based on a IncomingMessage (which includes a slack.Msg and a normalized text content. Note that a match doesn't guarantee that the action should actually respond with anything once invoked

type Option

type Option func(*Slackscot)

Option defines an option for a Slackscot

type OutgoingMessage

type OutgoingMessage struct {
	*slack.OutgoingMessage
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

OutgoingMessage holds a plugin generated slack outgoing message along with the plugin identifier

type Plugin

type Plugin struct {
	Name             string
	Commands         []ActionDefinition
	HearActions      []ActionDefinition
	ScheduledActions []ScheduledActionDefinition

	// Those slackscot services are injected post-creation when slackscot is called.
	// A plugin shouldn't rely on those being available during creation
	UserInfoFinder UserInfoFinder
	Logger         SLogger
}

Plugin represents a plugin (its name, action definitions and slackscot injected services)

type RealTimeMessageSender

type RealTimeMessageSender interface {
	// SendNewMessage is the function that sends a new message to the specified channelID
	SendNewMessage(message string, channelID string) (err error)

	// GetAPI is a function that returns the internal slack RTM
	GetAPI() *slack.RTM
}

RealTimeMessageSender is implemented by any value that has the SendNewMessage and GetAPI method. The main purpose is a slight decoupling of the slack.RTM in order for plugins to be able to write tests more easily if all they do is send new messages on a channel. GetAPI leaks the slack.RTM for more advanced uses.

type SLogger

type SLogger interface {
	Printf(format string, v ...interface{})

	Debugf(format string, v ...interface{})
}

SLogger is the slackscot internal logging interface. The standard library logger implements this interface

type ScheduledAction

type ScheduledAction func(sender RealTimeMessageSender)

ScheduledAction is what gets executed when a ScheduledActionDefinition is triggered (by its ScheduleDefinition)

type ScheduledActionDefinition

type ScheduledActionDefinition struct {
	// Indicates whether the action should be omitted from the help message
	Hidden bool

	// Schedule definition determining when the action runs
	Schedule schedule.Definition

	// Help description for the scheduled action
	Description string

	// ScheduledAction is the function that is invoked when the schedule activates
	Action ScheduledAction
}

ScheduledActionDefinition represents when a scheduled action is triggered as well as what it does and how

type SlackMessageID

type SlackMessageID struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

SlackMessageID holds the elements that form a unique message identifier for slack. Technically, slack also uses the workspace id as the first part of that unique identifier but since an instance of slackscot only lives within a single workspace, that part is left out

type Slackscot

type Slackscot struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

Slackscot represents what defines a Slack Mascot (mostly, a name and its plugins)

func NewSlackscot

func NewSlackscot(name string, v *viper.Viper, options ...Option) (s *Slackscot, err error)

NewSlackscot creates a new slackscot from an array of plugins and a name

func (*Slackscot) RegisterPlugin

func (s *Slackscot) RegisterPlugin(p *Plugin)

RegisterPlugin registers a plugin with the Slackscot engine. This should be invoked prior to calling Run

func (*Slackscot) Run

func (s *Slackscot) Run() (err error)

Run starts the Slackscot and loops until the process is interrupted

type UserInfoFinder

type UserInfoFinder interface {
	GetUserInfo(userID string) (user *slack.User, err error)
}

UserInfoFinder defines the interface for finding a slack user's info

func NewCachingUserInfoFinder

func NewCachingUserInfoFinder(v *viper.Viper, loader UserInfoFinder, logger SLogger) (uf UserInfoFinder, err error)

NewCachingUserInfoFinder creates a new user info service with caching if enabled via userProfileCacheSizeKey. It requires an implementation of the interface that will do the actual loading when not in cache