Introducing ChatOps to my Workplace: Hubot

Hubot? You may not have heard of it, but its pretty much the workhorse of ChatOps. Hubot is a scriptable chatroom robot. It can integrate with many chat services and comes with a huge community of plugins and extensions.

In the previous post I talk about ChatOps, Slack, and how I plan on introducing it to my workplace.

Hubot is an IRC/campfire bot designed to give some character to your team’s channel. It has various commands for inserting photos in your chat, fetching stuff, and, indeed, running pre-configured commands.

There exists many other chatbots, but Hubot is the most popular. You can get scripts for anything: showing images, interacting with Jenkins, ship it squirrel, pager-duty, and hubot-plusplus, where the points don’t matter.

All of the plugins are written in coffeescript and follow a simple input/output design using regular expressions. Persistence is included as well, using Redis as the datastore.

Writing Hubot scripts can automate tasks while presenting a simple interface to interact with. Writing custom scripts adds useful insights and actions into your business and software.

So far I’ve written a custom Docker image that contains everything needed to run Hubot, bundled with a bunch of scripts. Everything is kept in a Git repository on our SCM server.

In the future, I plan on making the Docker images more extensible by separating the configuration from the code, then publishing it to my GitHub.

I also want to use Docker Compose to define a Redis container as a dependency of the Hubot container. This primarily allows for the Hubot container to be destroyed and rebuilt while the data stays safe in its own container.