Noob SNHUbot

A simple Slack bot written in Python for the snhu_coders Slack workgroup. It's a fun side project for me and I welcome anyone interested to participate. Contact me on Slack or open an issue if you'd like to see an enhancement to the bot.

Getting Started

To get started, fork this repository to your own account. From there, clone your repository to your workstation and begin making changes. Follow the instructions in the links provided for more details.

Python Version

The production environment runs Python 3.6.7. Keep this in mind while developing as some features from later versions may not be available in production.

Installing

It's recommended to use a virtual environment when working on this project to separate the requirements and avoid conflicts you may have with other projects.

I've used the venv module on Windows 10 for my own development environment, but other methods like virtualenv should suffice.

Once you're setup, update your pip version and install the packages in the requirements.txt file into your environment:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Contributing

Be sure to check out our CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Current State

Noob SNHUbot loads a series of commands and can execute them when prompted by a user through the Slack channel. It only utilizes the Slack Client RTM API. The Events and Web APIs have not been utilized, but may be implemented at a later time.

Functionality

Noob SNHUbot will respond to the following direct messages. To begin a conversation, start a message in the channel with @Noob SNHUbot:

• catalog
  • Uses SNHU Course Catalog Data to fetch details about course subjects and course IDs.
  • catalog subject returns a list of Course IDs for the given subject:
    • catalog Computer Science
  • catalog courseID will return an attachment with catalog data for the course:
    • catalog CS499
  • catalog courseID1 courseID2 courseID3 will return attachments for up to three course IDs.
  • Acceptable formats for course ID are: ABC-123, ABC 123, or ABC123, case insensitive.
• channels
  • Displays a detailed list of channels in the Slack workgroup.
• help
  • Shows a list of known commands.
• it140
  • Gives links to tutorial videos pertaining to course material in IT-140.
  • Requires secondary command to indicate desired topic: @Noob SNHUbot it140 topic.
    • Calling the command with no topic, @Noob SNHUbot it140, gives a help list with valid topics.
  • Valid secondary commands are:
    • basics: gives video links pertaining to Python basics.
    • dicts: gives video links pertaining to Python dictionaries.
    • files: gives video links pertaining to Python file handling.
    • functions: gives video links pertaining to Python functions.
    • lists: gives video links pertaining to Python lists.
    • project: gives video links pertaining to the various script projects in IT-140.
    • regex: gives video links pertaining to regular expressions in Python.
• packtbook
  • Reaches out to the Packtbook Website to display the latest free book of the day.
  • Automatically scheduled to launch at 8:30PM Eastern Time.
  • Supports secondary request command:
    • Enabled by adding a book_requests section to the mongo configuration as seen below. Requests can be disabled independently of mongo by simply omitting book_requests.
    • @Noob SNHUbot packtbook request (-a/--add) [list, of, words, "or phrases", here] adds request words for the requesting user.
    • @Noob SNHUbot packtbook request (-d/--delete) [list, of, words, "or phrases", here] deletes the given word(s) from the user's requests.
    • @Noob SNHUbot packtbook request (-c/--clear) clears all of the user's requests.
    • @Noob SNHUbot packtbook request --justforfun prints out an ugly list of all of the current requests.
    • @Noob SNHUbot packtbook request --admin is intended for admin functionality, but is not yet implemented.
    • Words can be separated either by space or comma. Phrases need to be enclosed by quotes "".
  • If requests are enabled in the configuration, users are tagged when books are posted if words in the book's title match a user's request words.
• roll XdY[±Z]
  • Rolls X number of Y-Sided dice with a + or - Z modifier!
  • Invalid rolls will respond with "That roll is not valid. Try @Noob SNHUbot roll help"
  • roll help will respond with a help message that explains the syntax with examples
  • Valid rolls respond with a Slack Attachment message indicated the total value of the roll, what roll is operated on, individual roll values, and the modifier applied
• what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
  • A clever joke.
  • Responds with a Youtube video to a Monty Python and the Holy Grail clip.
• what's my name?
  • Simple call and response.
  • Responds with: "Your name is <@{name}>! Did you forget or something?"

Modular Commands

Commands are now modular! Command scripts are stored in the cmds module. When loaded, the module will dynamically load all commands and store them in a series of lists depending on their public flag. In order to use them, the command script must follow these strict guidelines:

• command variable
  • The command variable must be defined. It is used to identify the command trigger for the bot.
• public variable
  • Boolean value if the command should be publicly callable by users or privately used internally by the bot itself.
• execute(command, user, bot)
  • The execute() function must be defined with command, user, and bot parameters so the bot can call the command.
    • bot was added so the command can make references to the bot, such as the bot's id, which was pretty common.
  • The execute() function must return response and attachment. These can be set to None.

Command Module Example

command = "test"
public = True

def execute(command, user, bot):
    attachment = None
    response = "This is just an example."

    return response, attachment

Configuration

The preferred method to configure the bot is now YAML. Configuration files can be created and passed as arguments when launching the application (see next section).

Sample app.yml:

bot_name:       "Noob SNHUbot"
mail_user:     "[email protected]"
mail_pass:     "SUPER_SECRET_PASSWORD"
smtp_address:   "smtp.gmail.com"
smtp_port:      465
admin_emails:   ['[email protected]']

Sample slack.yml:

token: xoxb-123456789012-aBcDeFgHiJkLmNoPqRsTuVwXyZ  

Sample mongo.yml:

db: my_database
collections:
  conn: conn_log
  cmds: cmd_log
  book_requests: book_requests
hostname: my_db_server
port: 27017

Launching the Bot

With decoupling the Bot, Slack and Mongo tasks, the primary script, noob_snhubot.py, contains only that which it needs to process the primary loop. Optional command line arguments have been added with the use of the argparse library.

usage: noob_snhubot.py [-h] [-a APP_CONFIG] [-m MONGO_CONFIG]
                       [-c SCHED_CONFIG] [-d DELAY]
                       [-s SLACK_CONFIG | -e SLACK_ENV_VARIABLE]

Launch the Noob SNHUBot application.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a APP_CONFIG, --app_config APP_CONFIG
                        Relative path to Bot Application configuration file.
  -m MONGO_CONFIG, --mongo_config MONGO_CONFIG
                        Relative path to Mongo Database configuration file.
  -c SCHED_CONFIG, --sched_config SCHED_CONFIG
                        Relative path to Scheduler Configuration file.
  -d DELAY, --delay DELAY
                        Sets the delay between RTM reads.
  -s SLACK_CONFIG, --slack_config SLACK_CONFIG
                        Relative path to Slack configuration file.
  -e SLACK_ENV_VARIABLE, --slack_env_variable SLACK_ENV_VARIABLE
                        Environment variable holding the Slack client token.

Examples command execution

python noob_snhubot.py --app_config config\app.yml --slack_config config\slack.yml --mongo_config config\mongo.yml
python noob_snhubot.py -a config\app.yml -s config\slack.yml -m config\mongo.yml

python noob_snhubot.py -a config\app.yml

python noob_snhubot.py -s config\slack.yml

python noob_snhubot.py -e SLACK_ENV_VARIABLE

python noob_snhubot.py -c config\schedule.yml

python noob_snhubot.py -d 5

python noob_snhubot.py --help

Scheduled Commands

It's here! (No, seriously, I finally did it).

The Scheduler has been greatly improved for Noob_SNHUbot 2.0. It now uses a YAML config file (explained below), passed to the primary script. Threads will be spun up 10 minutes before a scheduled task, so no more threads hanging around idle forever. Additionally, schedule cleanup will only occur after the time for a scheduled task has passed, reducing the number of calls to a threads is_active() method.

Scheduler YAML config

The configuration is a series of YAML dictionaries (mappings). Each command to be setup in the scheduler should be the top-level key, and then within that will be three additional mappings args, channel, and schedule.

• args represents additional data passed to the command.
  • For example, the roll command takes a dice roll to process, so something like "1d20" can be passed into args, otherwise, simply leave blank ""
• channel is the Slack Channel ID that the command output will be sent to. This can be retrieved from the a browser's address bar when viewing the Slack channel.
• schedule follows standard cron expression time, and will be processed by the croniter library to schedule the command.
  • Basic cron syntax is as follows:

 ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
 │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
 │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
 │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
 │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
 │ │ │ │ │                                   7 is also Sunday on some systems)
 │ │ │ │ │
 │ │ │ │ │
"* * * * *"   <= String representation of cron schedule

• The packtbook schedule, which runs each day at 8:30pm, would be "30 20 * * *"
• See the cron Wikipedia page for more details on cron scheduling

Sample schedule.yml:

"packtbook":
  args:       ""
  channel:    "ABCD12345"  
  schedule:   "30 20 * * *"
  
"roll":
  args:       "1d20"
  channel:    "ABCD12345"  
  schedule:   "0 1 27 10 *"