blueskeptical / acrobot

A simple acronym bot for Google Chat

Acrobot

Acrobot is a Google Hangouts chat bot, with the aim of keeping track of acronyms used within the company.

Usage

Acrobot is capable of multiple actions:

• Saving an acronym: !acronym = explanation
• Getting an acronym explanation: acronym
• Modifying an acronym explanation: !acronym = explanation => new explanation
• Removing an acronym explanation: !acronym = explanation =>

White spaces do not matter. If you are interacting with acrobot in a room, do not forget to tag the bot, e.g. @Acrobot !acronym = explanation.

You can change and remove only those explanations that you entered into the database.

Architecture

Acrobot is a simple application, using:

• Java (tested against OpenJDK 11)
• Hibernate
• MySQL
• Kubernetes/OpenShift for deployment #todo OCP template

This particular implementation uses Google's Cloud Pub/Sub messaging middleware.

custom_mark10 @startuml; actor "Google Hangouts" as User; participant "Pub/Sub middleware" as A; participant Acrobot; User -> A: Send a message; Acrobot --> A: Poll for a message; Acrobot --> User: Send a response; @enduml; custom_mark10

As such, before deploying the Google bot, you have to complete Google's Pub/Sub prerequisites:

1. Create a project in the Cloud Platform Console, which:
   1. Has the Pub/Sub API enabled.
   2. Has granted the Pub/Sub permissions to the [email protected] service role.
2. Create a service account with the Pub/Sub API roles.
3. Create a message queue in the Cloud Platform Console.
4. Associate the queue with a subscription in the Cloud Platform Console.

For more details on setting up the bot, see the Google Developer's documentation.

Acrobot has a few dependencies:

1. export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS: an environment variable that contains the path to the service account json you created. If you are deploying Acrobot on Kubernetes/OpenShift, you will have to inject the file either using a secret, or a config map, into your pod.
2. export JDBC_URL, JDBC_USER, and JDBC_PASSWORD for the DB connection details.
3. export PROJECT_ID and SUBSCRIPTION_ID which match your Google project and subscription created earlier.

Testing

Acrobot contains unit tests with an in-memory H2 database. You should execute all tests before pushing new code. You can execute tests by issuing: mvn clean test. To execute a particular test, you can specify the test parameter in the format of ClassName#TestName, for example:

mvn clean test -Dtest=MessageHelperTest#exceptionPropagationTest

All new features should have tests.

Credits

Author: Marek Czernek. The idea of Acrobot came from a number of very smart folks at Red Hat. The IRC implementation was done by https://github.com/mfojtik. If you wish to run AcroBot on IRC, see the AcroBot Implementation.