A package that defines various classes that can be used to define and organize functionality for GroupMe bots. The groupme-bot package has the following exports:
Bot: A class that can be used as a base for defining functionality of a GroupMe bot.BotGroup: A class that can be used for organizing a collection of bots, such that the bots can be treated as one collective "unit", or can be referenced by their names.Message: A message sent by a bot. This is an abstract form of an outgoing GroupMe message.botRouter: A function that takes aBotGroupand returns an expressjsRouterobject that can be used as an endpoint for the GroupMe bot API.groupmeServices: A collection of functions for communicating with the GroupMe API.bots: A collection of example bots with a variety of functions and behaviors.
A more detailed explanation of each exported object can be found below.
The Bot class is used as a base class for defining bot functionality. A bot has the following things:
name: A readable name for the botid: The GroupMe bot ID, used to post messagesoptions: An object specifying any tweakable parameters for the botconsult(): A function used to notify the bot of incoming messages, so the bot can respond accordingly. This function must be overridden by a subclass ofBot.
A Bot fires a 'message' event whenever it wants to post a message, with the content of the event being a Message object. The post(), postDelayed(), and postTime() are used to trigger this event.
The constructor for a subclass of Bot should follow a standard format. The constructor must take two arguments, the first argument being the bot id, and the second argument being the options object. This is necessary in order for the clone() functions of the Bot and BotGroup classes to work.
A BotGroup is used to organize several bots together, and define callback function to use whenever a bot sends a message. The constructor for BotGroup takes a varargs list of Bots.
BotGroup listens for 'message' events from any of the bots it is created with, and simply re-emits these events. This makes it easy to listen for a 'message' event from any of a number of bots, simply by creating a BotGroup from those bots and then listening for 'message' events from the BotGroup.
The consult() and consultAll() functions are used to send an incoming message to either one bot (referenced by name), or to all bots in the group.
The botRouter function allows for the creation of an express.js Router that may run several bots simultaneously.
the botRunner function takes a BotGroup as its first argument, and an optional string as its second argument, and returns an expressjs Router object. For any bot in the BotGroup, POST requests through the router to the path /[bot.name] will be directed to the bot. The second argument, requestKey, is used to prevent message spoofing – even if someone figures out the URL endpoint (it is open source, after all), they would need to know the key in order for a POSTed message to be considered. This key is passed as a query parameter, "key", in the request, and so any requests that are missing the key or have an invalid key are ignored.
The groupmeServices object defines the following functions for communicating with the GroupMe API:
postBotMessage: takes aMessageobject as its only argument, and sends thatMessageto the GroupMe bot message posting endpoint.uploadImagePNG: takes a PNG imageBufferas its first argument, and a GroupMe access token as its second argument, uploads the image to GroupMe's image hosting service, and resolves to the resulting URL for the image.