September 2016 – Martin Minnock

September 3, 2016April 15, 2022

AWS ChatOps with Hubot & Slack

There can be many reasons for wanting to explore the use of Chatbots. In situations where collaboration tools like Slack are already in place, introducing a bot is merely another form of automation to support the way people work. In companies that are interested in providing a forum for people to develop technical skills, there are definite possibilities offered through Chatbots, especially as extending their functionality is not overly difficult and actually makes them more useful. For the enthusiast, Chatbots provide a glimpse into a future where interactions with technology are more fluid, based on natural language and conversation, but this is where challenges remain, for despite all the powerful technology that has been used to create Hubot, frankly it isn’t that chatty for a chatbot.

September 2, 2016April 15, 2022

Configure Hubot to run in background via systemd

In /etc/systemd/system create a “hubot.service” file and populate it as follows:


$ sudo vi hubot.service

[Unit]
Description=Hubot
Requires=network.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/io

Restart=always
RestartSec=10

ExecStart=/io/bin/hubot --adapter slack

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

September 1, 2016April 15, 2022

Using Hubot with Slack

Slack is the latest hip tool that technology teams have come to depend on. Based on an idea eerily similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) that was extremely popular back in the mid-nineties, Slack allows teams to collaborate in web and app based chat rooms and is growing in popularity with enterprises as well as the smaller start-up world where it first took off, as larger businesses are realising that Slack provides a very neat audit trail through the log of the chats themselves.

Slack is extremely extensible, and this is where Hubot comes in. Slack is the perfect interface for Hubot as bots can be team members in Slack, appearing in chat rooms and interacting like everyone else.