HipBot

A simple, expandable paranoid android for HipChat. Written in Node.js.

He does your bidding even with his failed prototype of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology.

It was written as a way for me to learn Coffeescript and Node.js and is based heavily off of wobut, evilbot, and robut. It should very much be considered a toy but feel free to help make it better and point out my mistakes!

Currently HipBot knows:

• Basic Personality (feelings, robot laws, etc) @marvin the laws
• Current Weather Forecast by Zip @marvin weather in ZIP
• Find a Wikipedia page @marvin wiki me TOPIC
• Google Image search @marvin image me PHRASE
• LOLcats @marvin lolcat me
• FailBlog @marvin failblog me
• XKCD comic @marvin xkcd me
• Respond with That's What She Said when appropriate through the TWSS ruby gem.

Installation

HipBot is written in Node.js using coffeescript.

** I will add it to npm as soon as I can streamline the install process a bit and jsdom is updated.

It also relies on node-xmpp which I had trouble getting to run on OS X. It works flawlessly on Ubuntu though.

I use Vagrant on OS X to boot up an Ubuntu vbox.

Also note that node-xmpp requires:

• libexpat1-dev: apt-get install libexpat1-dev
• libicu-dev: apt-get install libicu-dev

To install make sure you have npm installed:

git clone [email protected]:particlebanana/hipbot.git
cd hipbot
npm install

Note:

Some plugins require the latest version of jsdom from github. When 2.0.1 is released you will be able to install via npm for now follow the directions here.

You will need to configure the settings in hipbot.coffee with you xmpp connection information you get from hipchat.

Usage

I named the bot marvin based on Marvin the Paranoid Android from the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

To see a list of commands Marvin can execute send: @marvin help in the chatroom. He also responds to some basic personality request and my personal favorite @marvin the laws.

The Bot Brain

The core file is hipbot.coffee which loads all the connection options and autoloads the bots skills. All the logic is done in /lib/brain.coffee. This needs work.

Bot Ninja Skills

HipBot has pluggable skills that can be added by creating a new skill file in /skills. These files are autoloaded so to remove a skill you must remove the file. I plan on making this a config option eventually.

Skills are simply functions that are triggered with the onMessage event. In order for your skill to display in the help command you must include a desc function.

Example:

// exports the function
module.exports.load = (bot) ->
  bot.desc 'hello world', 'returns Hello World'
  bot.onMessage '@marvin hello world', helloWorld

// sends a message to the current chatroom
helloWorld = (channel, from, message) ->
  @message channel, 'Hello World'
  true

Shell Scripts

Some skills may require you to execute shell scripts. An example of this is included with the TWSS (Thats What She Said) skill. It uses the ruby gem twss through the Node spawn command to execute a shell script.

Any external scripts needed for new skills should be added to the /tools folder. To use them create symlink to somewhere in you PATH so that HipBot can have access to them through the command line.