Slacker is abandoned; check out lazlo instead!
Slacker taught me a lot about writing chatops automation, and what sort of framework I wanted to accomplish that work. TLDR: a chatbot is great front-end UI, but on the back-end I want something more like an event-broker.
Here are some things Slacker did right:
- Slacker was very easy to configure and get up and running
- 12-factor clean, so it works well with PaaS and etc..
- It was well integrated with slack (arguably a mark against it)
- It was more flexible than the tradional IRC bot listen/respond pattern
Lazlo Carries over all of those things, but dispenses with the concept of a plugin as a single-purpose bit of code that uses one Handler-type to do one thing.
In Lazlo, plug-ins work pretty much just like singl-file go programs. They execute in their own goroutine in parallel and can interact with Lazlo as a broker to be notified of the events they want as they want them. Slacker plugins required you to reason about Slacker's framework to accomplish your goal, whereas Lazlo plugins act and feel much more like stand-alone entities that are augmented by events that Lazlo can provide.
Apologies if you invested some of your time and effort to get started working with slacker, you are, of course free to fork away, but I hope you'll join Lazlo and I instead.
Written in Go for SlackHQ (using the RTM API), Slacker provides features that make it easy to model and abstract many different types of interaction between engineers and production environments.
- Define Event and Message Handlers so Slacker will parse and respond to chat conversation and commands
- Specify Cron-Syntax Schedules for Slacker to run periodic Chores
- In-Memory or Redis-backed persistent storage built-in (aka hubot.brain)
- Set up inbound and outbound filters to modify events enroute to or from SlackHQ
- Correctly handle and respond to system-level events like SigTerms by configuring runtime hooks
- Configures via env-vars and logs to stdout like a well behaved 12-factor app
- Efficient, parallel execution of handlers, filters, and chores
- Simple semantics for creating and linking-in your own plugins
- (Pretty) complete support for the Slack Web API
1: Select Configure Integrations from your team menu in slack
2: Add a new Bots integration, give your bot a clever name, and take note of your Token
3:
go get github.com/djosephsen/slacker
4:
export SLACKER_NAME=<whatever you named your bot in the Slack UI>
export SLACKER_TOKEN=<your token>
export SLACKER_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG # (optional if you'd like to see verbose console messages)
5:
slacker
At this point you should see slacker join your default channel and say hi.
If you ctl-C him in the console window, you should also see him say goodbye before he leaves the channel.
These behaviors are both implemented as inithooks (the first as a startup hook and the second as a shutdown hook). If you find this annoying you can comment them out from the yourPluginsGoHere.go file, which is the file that controls all of the plugins Slacker uses to interact with you and your production environment. Slacker comes with a variety of simple plugins to get you started and give you examples to work from, and it's pretty easy to add your own. Making and managing your own plugins is pretty much why you're here in the first place after all.
0: Have a github account, a Heroku account, Heroku Toolbelt installed, and upload your ssh key to Github and Heroku
1: Select Configure Integrations from your team menu in slack
2: Add a new Bots integration, give your bot a clever name, and take note of your Token
3:
go get github.com/kr/godep
4: Go to https://github.com/djosephsen/slacker/fork to fork this repository (or click the fork button up there ^^)
5 through like 27:
mkdir -p $GOPATH/github.com/<yourgithubname>
cd $GOPATH/github.com/<yourgithubname>
git clone git@github.com:<yourgithubname>/slacker.git
cd slacker
git remote add upstream https://github.com/djosephsen/slacker.git
chmod 755 ./importfix.sh && ./importfix.sh
go get
godep save
heroku create -b https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-go.git
heroku config:set SLACKER_NAME=<whatever you named your bot in the Slack UI>
heroku config:set SLACKER_TOKEN=<your token>
heroku config:set SLACKER_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG
git add --all .
git commit -am 'lets DO THIS'
git push
git push heroku master
At this point you should see slacker join your channel.
When you make changes or add plugins in the future, you can push them to heroku with:
godep save
git add --all .
git commit -am 'snarky commit message'
git push && get push heroku
Find out what slacker can do out of the box Get started adding, removing, and creating plugins Learn more about configuring Slacker (there's not much to it)
Slacker wants to be a quality, featureful Slack-specific chatbot with a focus on operations-abstractions. It borrows heavily in design and implementation from Hal and gopherbot, but focuses less on giving you a library to write a chatbot, and more on giving you a chatbot.
I made Slacker to be a tool. Through it, I'm hoping to provide a flexible framework that can solve the operational needs of engineers, like deploying code to production, providing timely metric data, running automated break-fix and defensive network re-configurations and stuff like that.
I also made Slacker to be an anthropomorphic bot whose personality you can shape, because people don't use what they don't like. But things that are fun are interesting, and things that are interesting get adopted, improved, used, and cherished.
If you're in a chatops shop today and that sounds interesting to you I'd love your comments and help. Actually, even if you're not in a chatops shop today and this looks interesting to you I'd love your comments and help.
Slacker is basically working and basically documented. All plugin types are implemented and functional and there are several included plugins of varying degress of complexity that should help get you started writing your own plugins.
- I'm considering some drastic changes to the Broker code to support the bullet point above
- Integrated statsd support for emitting metrics
- Transparent support for custom slash-commands
- Other loftier stuff like redundancy, failover, and Lua-Plugins that I'm too busy to seriously think about yet.