hubot-group

A script that expands mentions of groups, making it easy to ping groups of people without manually typing out a bunch of names. hubot-group is fully configurable via chat.

Demo

Text Demo

me [12:28 PM] 
@bot group create workbusiness-onshift


bot [12:28 PM] 
Created group workbusiness-onshift.


me [12:28 PM] 
@bot group add workbusiness-onshift bakedslug boarsproduct glitteringunderline


bot [12:28 PM] 
bakedslug added to group workbusiness-onshift.
boarsproduct added to group workbusiness-onshift.
glitteringunderline added to group workbusiness-onshift.


me [12:28 PM] 
@workbusiness-onshift


bot [12:28 PM] 
_me_ | *@workbusiness-onshift*: @bakedslug, @boarsproduct, @glitteringunderline


boarsproduct [12:28 PM] 
Neat.


me [12:28 PM] 
help me @workbusiness-onshift you're my only hope


bot [12:28 PM] 
_me_ | *@workbusiness-onshift*: @bakedslug, @boarsproduct, @glitteringunderline


me [12:29 PM] 
@bot login workbusiness-onshift


bot [12:29 PM] 
me punched in to workbusiness-onshift!


me [12:29 PM] 
@workbusiness-onshift blah


bot [12:29 PM] 
_me_ | *@workbusiness-onshift*: @me, @bakedslug, @boarsproduct, @glitteringunderline


me [12:29 PM] 
@bot logout


bot [12:29 PM] 
me logged out of workbusiness-onshift! :wave:

Installation

In hubot project repo, run:

npm install defenestration/hubot-group --save

Then add hubot-group to your external-scripts.json:

[
  "hubot-group"
]

If you want to be able to change configuration settings from the chat without having to use environment variables, you should also install hubot-conf.

Usage

hubot-group is pretty intuitive to use. Run the help command ({botname} help group) in your chat to see help documentation.

Use @bot login $group to log yourself into that group. You may have to omit automatically added @ prefixed to the group name (for now).
Use @bot logout to log yourself out of all groups, or @bot logout $group to logout of a specific one.

Tips

You can add groups to other groups by referring to a group as &groupname. For example, you can create a frontend group that contains a bunch of members, and then you can create a dev group that includes &frontend.
For slack, the groups this creats exist outside of slack. I suggest creating the same named slack group (with no users actually in it!) for autocompletion purposes.

Access from other scripts

Some robot.on functionality has been implemented to allow other scripts to intergrate with hubot-group. This expects a group name, room name, and an slack message object. An example is in src/group.coffee.

robot.emit "group ping", "myGroup", "myRoom", { text: "pinging!" }

Http

Groups can be viewed over http at /hubot/group/dump. Individual groups can be seen at /hubot/group/info/groupName.

Configuration

hubot-group can be configured either using hubot-conf or environment variables. hubot-conf settings override environment variables.

For all of the settings below like HUBOT_SETTING_NAME, you can change the setting via chat by saying {botname} conf set setting.name "{new value}" (the setting name is mapped by skipping the HUBOT_ part, changing to lowercase, and replacing _ with .).

HUBOT_GROUP_DECORATOR - a character indicating how to decorate usernames. Valid settings are <, (, [, and {. This variable can also be left unset. This seting defaults to `` (empty string), which is appropriate for Slack.
HUBOT_GROUP_PREPEND - set to false to disable prepending the original message to the response. This variable can also be left unset. This setting defaults to true.
HUBOT_GROUP_PREPEND_USERNAME - set to false to disable prepending the original username to the prepended message. This variable can also be left unset. This setting defaults to true.
HUBOT_GROUP_TRUNCATE - number of characters from the original message to display when HUBOT_GROUP_PREPEND is set. Set to a value less than or equal to zero to disable truncating. This setting defaults to 50.
HUBOT_GROUP_RECURSE - set to false to disable recursive group expansion. This setting defaults to true.
HUBOT_GROUP_SEPARATOR - a string to separate the returned groups with, defaults to \n newline. Suggest to use a space if you groups grow too large.

defenestration / hubot-group