Recently, I have started using Slack for a small group project. I have heard that hubot can be used to automize some regular and routine work. It is an appealing idea to chat with a bot and get things done.
What is hubot
For those who may be unfamiliar with hubot, it is a smart chatting robot that can respond to your input, do things, and/or give its response.
- First of all, hubot is a chatting robot and can speak more natural language. In other words, it is an API that talks more like human rather than queries formed like links.
- Hubot can be connected to multiple platforms. With official or third-party adapters hubot can be connected against multiple platforms or web/mobile applications. It can then chat with you on QQ/wechat/Twitter and more. Of course, it also connects to Slack.
- Rather than just talking, the robot do things. It can run a program on its local server or send information to other online services. In this way, it works like IFTTT but is capable to do more complicated tasks.
- Hubot is extendable. The behavior of hubot is defined by adding custom scripts. This gives you the flexibility to imagine what you want and implement with your best control.
Why use hubot
A few examples that I expect hubot to be useful:
- Send out posts given a paragraph I send
- Report analytic data once questioned
- more
Although none of these seems urgent now for the ongoing project, learning to deploy and write simple scripts can serve as a nice start for the following work.
How to deploy hubot (Work in progress)
I am planning to deploy hubot on heroku as it is officially recommended. This is still work in progress, so I will list my reference here below for the moment.
- Official hubot documentation
- Hubot slack adapter
- Steps to Install Hubot in Slack using Heroku
- Hubot scripts: scripts others use
- Put your pandorabot on Slack: pandorabot enables hubot to understand more natural language than its original patterns.
To be continued