Pat the Campfire Bot

last update: 2011-09-03

Is what it is, does what it says.

node.js so that it runs on Heroku. What do you know about bacon strips?

There are lots of dangling features, some extraneous code and the tests and specs are more like sanity checks. Feel free to ignore anything ugly.

This is my, "hey, I should learn node.js" project and most of it was written in a burst of activity over the weekend of 2011-07-23.

dependencies

Pat the bot is developed against:

• Javascript
  • node - 0.4.7
  • npm - 1.0.18
  • underscore - 1.1.7
  • dom-js - 0.0.1
  • mongoose - 1.7.3
  • jasmine-node - 1.0.6 (development)
• Ruby
  • heroku - 2.3.6
  • foreman - 0.18.0

setup

local

1. install node

make sure you have node installed. Version 0.4.7 if you want to run on heroku.

brew install node -v0.4.7

Do whatever it says to get your NODE_PATH env variable set up.

2. install npm

run the script, that should be enough to get started.

3. clone the repo

that's a secret

4. install dependencies

I think you cd into the project directory and type npm install .. Not sure, but I have them installed, so maybe that worked? YMMV.

To install mongo, all I did was brew install mongodb and everything just worked.

5. (optional) heroku support

You'll need ruby for this. Get it. I recommend rvm.

1. gem install heroku
2. gem install foreman

That's all.

heroku

1. git push heroku master
2. setup 30m ping on http://www.montastic.com/ to make sure the app doesn't get shut off. Heroku automatically turns off any dynos that haven't had a request in the last hour.

hacking

local env

I keep a .profile file in my project directory and source it in my shell before I start working. This lets me keep private stuff out of the code. It looks like this:

export campfire_bot_token=12345thisisthetokencampfiregavemeweirdhuh
export campfire_bot_account=zoomakroom
export campfire_bot_room=100000     # staging
export campfire_service_room=100000 # staging
# export campfire_bot_room=900000   # production
export campfire_logging_room=100000 # bot chatter
export PATH=$(npm bin):$PATH

I think that last PATH=$(npm bin):$PATH line is what keeps me, node, foreman, and npm happy in my local dev environment.

Wherever you deploy, you'll need those five campfire_* environment variables.

NOTE: campfire_bot_room can be a comma separated string, Pat can listen to multiple rooms now!

running the app

Code you write lives in src/. Everything in lib/ is either straight vendored, or generated by cake build or foreman start coffee.

When working on the code, running foreman start coffee is recommended to make sure lib/ stays up to date. To run the application, run node lib/bot.js or foreman start web. Plain foreman start will run the coffee script updater and the web service, but the code won't be up to date when it starts (race condition) and the application server doesn't auto-load updated modules. So, you'll have to stop and restart the server to see your changes.

plugins

Plugins live in src/plugins. All plugins export an object with a listen property which is a function. A basic echo plugin would look like this:

src/plugins/echo.coffee

module.exports =
  listen: (message, room) -> room.speak(message.body, console.log)

The listen method should take two arguments, message the message object handed over from Campfire and room, the Campfire room the message came from.

If you want to access the storage classes (User, Quote, Counter, etc.) you will have to require ./lib/store in the plugin. Take a look at src/plugins/phrases.coffee for an example.

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Based on "Quack-Bot: a campfire bot for Quick Left"