hubot-happy-birthder

Hubot script for writing birthday messages to users. It uses Tenor GIFs to make the messages more lively.

Features

The functionality of the script is divided into two parts: handling birthdays and work anniversaries.

• Birthdays
  • Asking new employees to specify their date birth and reminding them about it if they ignore this request for some reason.
  • Fetching a random GIF from Tenor before writing a birthday message to a birthday boy/girl. The TENOR_SEARCH_TERM environment variable stores a comma separated list of the tags which will be used when fetching GIFs. By default, the value of the variable is 'darthvaderbirthday,futuramabirthday,gameofthronesbirthday,harrypotterbirthday,kingofthehillbirthday,lanadelreybirthday,madhatterbirthday,pulpfictionbirthday,rickandmortybirthday,rocketbirthday,sheldonbirthday,simpsonbirthday,thesimpsonsbirthday,tmntbirthday'.
  • Writing birthday messages to #general.
  • Reminding users of the upcoming birthdays one day and a few days in advance. It's possible to specify how long before the event occurs the reminder should be triggered.
  • Providing fault tolerance:
    • if Tenor is for some reason unavailable right now, the script will try to request it a number of times with delays;
    • if all the requests failed, users will receive their birthday messages anyway.
  • Creating private channels in advance and inviting all the users to the channels except the birthday boys/girls for the purpose of discussing the presents for them. Expired channels are automatically removed.
• Work anniversaries
  • Memorizing the date when a new employee logs in to Rocket.Chat for the first time (the date is equal to the first working day in the company).
  • Congratulating employees on anniversary of working in the company (congratulations are written to #general).

Prerequisites

• The bot must be in the channel specified via the BIRTHDAY_LOGGING_CHANNEL environment variable.
• The bot has to have view-full-other-user-info permission.

Installation

In hubot project repo, run:

npm install git+https://github.com/tolstoyevsky/hubot-happy-birthder --save

Then add hubot-happy-birthder to your external-scripts.json:

[
  "hubot-happy-birthder"
]

Configuration

The script can be configured via the following environment variables (called parameters).

Parameter	Description	Default
TENOR_API_KEY	Сlient key for privileged API access. This is the only mandatory parameter.
TENOR_BLACKLIST	A comma separated list of the GIFs ids which will be excluded when choosing one from the list returned by Tenor. If the script randomly chooses a GIF from the response which belongs to the blacklist, the script sends one more request to Tenor.	641ee5344bdc3f9f4d3ef52344dfe6bd
TENOR_IMG_LIMIT	Fetches up to the specified number of result, but not more than 50.	50
TENOR_SEARCH_TERM	A comma separated list of tags which will be used when fetching GIFs from Tenor.	See Features
CREATE_BIRTHDAY_CHANNELS	Specifies whether to create the birthday channels for the purpose of discussing presents for birthday boys/girls. All the users are invited to the channel except the birthday boy/girl.	false
BIRTHDAY_CHANNEL_BLACKLIST	A comma separated list of the users which won't be invited to the birthday channel when it's created.
BIRTHDAY_CHANNEL_MESSAGE	The messages separated by | which are sent to the birthday channel one by one.	@%username% is having a birthday soon, so let's discuss a present.
BIRTHDAY_CHANNEL_TTL	Specifies TTL (time to live) of the birthday channel.	3
BIRTHDAY_LOGGING_CHANNEL	Allows specifying the name of the channel which is used for logging the events related to birth dates. The bot must be in the channel (see the Prerequisites sections).	hr
COMPANY_NAME	Allows specifying the company name which is used in the welcome message.	WIS Software
HAPPY_REMINDER_SCHEDULER	Allows specifying the frequency with which the script checks for nearest birthdays and writes birthday messages to users. The value of this parameter must follow the Cron Format.	0 0 7 * * *
NUMBER_OF_DAYS_IN_ADVANCE	Sets (in days) how long before the event occurs the reminder will be triggered.	7
ENABLE_PITCHING_IN_SURVEY	Specifies whether to create a pitching in survey. If the parameter is true, the bot asks every single user except the birthday boy/girl whether they will pitch in on a present for the birthday.	false

Example Interaction

some.user >> @hubot birthday set matt 15.02.1954
hubot >> Saving matt's birthday.
some.user >> @hubot birthday set homer 12.05.1956
hubot >> Saving homer's birthday.
some.user >> @hubot birthdays list
hubot >> homer was born on 12.05.1956
hubot >> matt was born on 15.02.1954

Known issues

When specifying a birth date for a particular user, the script may complain that it has never met the user before. In this case just ask the user to interact with the bot.

Authors

See AUTHORS.

Licensing

hubot-happy-birthder is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.