Scripting Campfire, Again

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post about scripting Campfire, the group chat tool from 37signals. At the time, my script posted a routine "today's date is" message with a variety of statistics. Over time, the statistics have disappeared — though I now post charts from Graphite — but the bot has been tirelessly plopping the date into each room each weekday (and now, in crunch time, each day).

Then I watched a video that mentioned the Campfire interface to HUBOT, github's little slave server that handles all sorts of tasks. What if we could type a command into Campfire and have it actually do something?

But what? A first use case quickly suggested itself.

One of our Campfire rooms is devoted to server issues, and my boss and I often, while chatting in there, make a comment such as "todo: update deployment instructions."

How often do you think we actually remember those todos? Did you guess "at least rarely"? You may have overshot.

Some after-hours refactoring of the Ruby scripts I originally wrote plus a bit of tinkering with a new script, and I had a very simple command parser. Now, when you type "@SimCityBot todo blah blah blah," you'll get an email saying something like "You wanted to be reminded to blah blah blah." That doesn't guarantee the task will get done, of course, but it does make it  less ephemeral.

The script is pretty straightforward: it polls each room looking for messages that start with "@SimCityBot," and then invokes a method with the same name as the first word in the text. That means adding a new command is now a simple matter of adding a single method to a file. Yay for Ruby's metaprogramming support! The script also maintains a YAML file that keeps track of the most recent messages in each room. This ensures that when the script is restarted, it doesn't respond a second time to every command it sees.

I had to add support to our Campfire library for uploading images in order to post our "slowest calls" graphs each day. Once that work was done, adding an "image" command was a single call. Give it a URL, and the the script downloads that image and re-uploads it to whatever room the command appeared in.

Next up is a command to kick off Hudson builds. For that one, of course, I'll want to spin off a process that can monitor the build and report back when it's done. A co-worker suggested listing Emeryville food trucks. (Which I maintain as a Twitter list.)

There's lots of things that the script isn't good at. Handling a command blocks until it's done. Error reporting is minimal. It doesn't support multi-word commands. But it's a little trinket I can poke at and have fun with.

Is this the most important thing I could be doing for SimCity? Let's hope not. But at the end of a long day, sometimes I need a break, and my breaks from programming are … other programming projects! SimCityBot provides a refreshing distraction that often buoys my mood and gives me a nice close to the day. That's also part of why I've not just installed HUBOT. There's less fun in that.

But the catalog of all HUBOT scripts is an inspiring read. AWS status checks? Graphite graphs? The latest XKCD? When is break time again?