LunchBot

LunchBot is a simple SlackBot, for scraping Facebook pages of local restaurants for daily/lunch offers. The current state of the bot is very naive, making assumptions about what constitutes a Facebook post with lunch offer etc.

Installation

The bot itself is a simple node.js application, in order to run it, you need to configure a new bot on Slack - you need to store the API key for the application. In addition, you should set up a new app on Facebook, noting down the App ID and Secret, both of which the bot also needs to operate.

Usage

You can simply run the bot with the following line. This will both set the necessary environmental variables as well as start the app.

BOT_SLACK_API_KEY={your_slack_api_key_here} BOT_FB_APP_ID={your_fb_app_id_here} BOT_FB_APP_SECRET={your_fb_app_secret_here} node index.js

Alternatively, you can set up a free Heroku app, defining the variables there and letting the specified Procfile do the rest.

Communicating with LunchBot from Slack

Once LunchBot has been added to a channel, just ask her about lunch and she'll reply back with a bunch of offers that she managed to scrape. Current keywords that will trigger the search are "offer", "lunch" and "menu". Keywords are only looked for in messages mentioning lunchbot.

Architecture

The app consists of two main components: the bot and the sources of information. Currently, the app simply creates the bot and defines a few sources for restaurants in Tallinn. The code should be sufficiently simple to understand and modify, most importantly, FacebookSource, the representation of a FB page of interest should be looked at, as well how the predefined locations are handled in index.js.

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Contributing

The current app is very naive in most of its parsing and filtering, any pull requests are welcome, especially ones addressing any of the following problems:

Photos attached to posts - some restaurants only share their menus as a photo with an optional caption. Figuring out whether such a post is of interest or not would be a cool feature.
Better organisation of restaurants, including adding new - currently all locations are in index.js, however, it would make more sense to keep this data outside of the app code in a configuration file.
Supporting more sources than just Facebook, for example webpages or mailing lists (with possible web archives of sent emails)
General improvements to the codebase, including clearer architecture and/or tests.

In general, contributions should all begin as an issue on this repository (to signify that work on something is being carried out), followed by a pull request that addresses the feature request/bug/etc.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

kirstein / lunchbot