@exoplay/exobot

Exobot

An ES6+ chatbot. Requires Node ^6.2.

Installation

• npm install --save @exoplay/exobot

A Brief Example

const Log = require('log');

const { Exobot, adapters, plugins } = require('../exobot');
const { Help, Greetings } = plugins;

const BOT_ALIAS = '!e';
const BOT_NAME = 'exobot';
const HTTP_LISTENER_PORT = process.env.PORT || '8080';
const LOG_LEVEL = process.env.EXOBOT_LOG_LEVEL || Log.INFO;

const shell = adapters.Shell;

const bot = new Exobot(BOT_NAME, {
  alias: BOT_ALIAS,
  adapters: [
    new shell(),
  ],
  plugins: [
    new Help(),
    new Greetings(),
  ],
  port: HTTP_LISTENER_PORT,
  logLevel: LOG_LEVEL,
});

module.exports = bot;

$ node index.js
> Chat: hi, exobot
> exobot: hi, shell!

What did we do there?

• Created a file named index.js
• Imported the Exobot class, service adapters, and plugins
• Initialized a new bot, passing in its name, configured service adapters and plugins, and configured an HTTP port
• Started the bot
• Ran node index.js and interacted with the bot

Getting started

The easiest way to start is copy the example above - this will get you started with a chatbot with a shell adapter. The shell adapter will start an interactive console with which you can chat in a single "room"; Exobot will respond to messages that trigger plugins.

1. Make a directory somewhere that you want to keep your bot's configuration code.
2. Run git init (or source control initialization method of choice), then npm init to start up an NPM package. (You probably won't publish your bot as its own package - but this will create a package.json file that contains your dependencies.)
3. Run npm install --save @exoplay/exobot to install the chatbot.
4. Copy the example above to index.js.
5. Run node index.js. Chat with yourself for a while, then read on to learn how to configure your chatbot, or even build your own plugins and adapters.

Configuration

Building adapters

Building plugins

Acknowledgements

Exobot is loosely based on hubot, for which the author has a great deal of admiration. Hubot is more user-friendly in many ways (autoloading scripts, for example, instead of requiring the user to write their own imports and configuration). In other ways, this flexibility can be limiting; it's easier to make a pure-js bot more efficient and testable (and the author thinks that ES6, rather than Coffeescript, is a more viable choice of language; plugin-writers can always choose to opt-in to Coffeescript and export a built file if they want.)

Additional thanks to the many, many Hubot script-writers that have provided a large base of existing scripts and adapters which were converted to Exobot. The original scripts' information has been preserved where scripts were converted rather than re-built.

License

MIT licensed. Copyright 2016 Exoplay, LLC. See LICENSE file for more details.