trinity

Matrix bots in Rust and WebAssembly

TL;DR

Trinity is an experimental bot framework written in Rust and using matrix-rust-sdk, as well as commands / modules compiled to WebAssembly, with convenient developer features like modules hot-reload.

What is this?

This started as a fun weekend project where I've written a new generic Matrix bot framework. It is written in Rust from scratch using the fantastic matrix-rust-sdk crate.

Bot commands can be implemented as WebAssembly components, using Wasmtime as the WebAssembly virtual machine, and wit-bindgen for conveniently implementing interfaces between the host and wasm modules.

See for instance the uuid and horsejs modules.

Make sure to install the required tools (as of this writing, wit-bindgen and wasm-tools) to be able to build wasm components. We're using a pinned revision of this that can automatically be installed with ./modules/install-tools.sh at the moment; we hope to lift that limitation in the future.

Modules can be hot-reloaded, making it trivial to deploy new modules, or replace existing modules already running on a server. It is also nice during development iterations on modules. Basically one can do the following to see changes in close to real-time:

• run trinity with cargo run
• cd modules/ && cargo watch -x "component build --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown --release" in another terminal

The overall generic design is inspired from my previous bot, botzilla, that was written in JavaScript and was very specialized for Mozilla needs.

Want / "roadmap"

At this point I expect this to be more of a weekend project, so I won't commit to any of those, but here's my ideas of things to implement in the future. If you feel like implementing some of these ideas, please go ahead :)

Core features

• fetch and cache user names
• make it possible to answer privately / to the full room / as a reply to the original message / as a thread reply.
• add ability to set emojis on specific messages (? this was useful for the admin module in botzilla)
• moonshot: JS host so one can test the chat modules on a Web browser, without requiring a matrix account
  • marsshot: existing modules built from CI and pushed to a simple Web app on github-pages that allows selecting an individual module and trying it.
• seek other TODO in code :p

Modules

• post on twitter. Example: !tweet Inflammatory take that will receive millions of likes and quote-tweets
  • same requirements as mastodon, likely
• gitlab auto-link to issues/merge requests: e.g. if someone types !123, post a link to https://{GITLAB_REPO_URL}/-/issues/123.
  • would require the room to be configured with a gitlab repository
  • same for github would be sweet
• ask what's the weather in some city, is it going to rain in the next hour, etc.
• YOUR BILLION DOLLARS IDEA HERE

Deploying

Docker

If you want, you can use the image published on Docker (bnjbvr/trinity) -- it might be lagging behind by a few commits -- or build the Docker image yourself:

docker build -t bnjbvr/trinity .

Then start it with the right environment variables (see also .env.example):

docker run -e HOMESERVER="matrix.example.com" \
    -e BOT_USER_ID="@trinity:example.com" \
    -e BOT_PWD="hunter2" \
    -e ADMIN_USER_ID="@admin:example.com" \
    -v /host/path/to/data/directory:/opt/trinity/data \
    -ti bnjbvr/trinity

Data is saved in the /opt/trinity/data directory, and it is recommended to make it a volume so as to be able to decrypt messages over multiple sessions and so on.

Custom Modules

If you want, you can specify a custom modules directory using the MODULES_PATHS environment variable and adding another data volume for it. This can be useful for hacking modules only without having to compile the host runtime. Here's an example using Docker:

docker run -e HOMESERVER="matrix.example.com" \
    -e BOT_USER_ID="@trinity:example.com" \
    -e BOT_PWD="hunter2" \
    -e ADMIN_USER_ID="@admin:example.com" \
    -e MODULES_PATH="/wasm-modules" \
    -v /host/path/to/data/directory:/opt/trinity/data \
    -v /host/path/to/modules:/wasm-modules \
    -ti bnjbvr/trinity

Configuration

Trinity can be configured via config file. The config file can be passed in from the command line:

cargo run -- config.toml

Or it can be placed in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, typically ~/.config/trinity/config.toml on XDG compliant systems. Configuration lives in the document root, for example:

home_server = "matrix.example.com"
user_id = "@trinity:example.com"
password = "hunter2"
matrix_store_path = "/path/to/store"
redb_path = "/path/to/redb"
admin_user_id = "@admin:example.com"
modules_path = ["/wasm-modules"]

Module Configuration

It's also possible to pass arbitrary configuration down to specific modules in the config file. For example:

[modules_config.pun]
format = "image"

This passes the object {"format": "image"} to the pun module's init function. It's up to specific modules to handle this configuration.

Is it any good?

Yes.

Contributing

We welcome community contributions to this project.

Why the name?

This is a Matrix bot, coded in Rust and WebAssembly, forming a holy trinity of technologies I love. And, Trinity is also a bad-ass character from the Matrix movie franchise.

License

LGPLv2 license.