isabella232 / chatbot-1

An FT bot

FTLabs Chatbot Hubot

Internal Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OctttbtcdZUMngXXi5dpic3Yhyij1fxsscx31JmCZFw/edit#

About,

This is the Financial Times Chatbot, running from:

Monday 18th May 2015 - Friday 15th June 2015

as an initial experiment in accessing FT content via a Chatbot in a companies internal messaging. We supported a few platforms:

• Slack
• GChat
• Web Interface
• rest interface: http://ftlabs-chatbot-test.herokuapp.com/v1/rest

Example Post request

POST to http://ftlabs-chatbot-test.herokuapp.com/v1/rest

content: application/json

{
	message: "recommend apple"
}

The project has been resurrected as of May 30th 2016 due to growing interest in Chatbots in the wider media community.

Features

Chatbot, if a query is not understood then it allows for a human operator to respond.

Example queries:

Building

The very basic way to start is:

$ npm install
$ npm start

This will start the bot in shell mode and interactive. If the HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN is set, it will default to slack. Chat with ftbottest when developing locally.

For full usage of Chatbot you will require the following environment variables (found in LastPass. Internal FT usage only)

Tests

To run tests:

$ npm test

Add tests to /test/, mocking any server calls with nock (see examples in /test/nock.js)

Basic

• PORT - Port to run the webserver from the bot uses this +1, default 3001 (bot uses 3002)
• REDISTOGO_URL - Redis To Go server to connect to, defaults to looking for a local redis instance
• HUBOT_HEROKU_KEEPALIVE_URL - URL to stop Redis going to sleep

Interfaces

You can only pick one:

• HUBOT_WEB_ENDPOINTS - set to 1 to use the web endpoint.

• HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN - Required to work with slack, token for connecting to slack bot.

• SLACK_HOOK_URL - Required to work with slack, team url for connecting to slack bot.

• HUBOT_GTALK_USERNAME - The bot's username for GTalk will possess that account and respond for it.

API keys

• ELASTIC_SEARCH_KEY - next-search api
• EMAILTHIS_RECAPTCHA_KEY - email this api
• EMAILTHIS_SECRET - email this api
• BITLY_API_KEY - bitly api
• BITLY_LOGIN - bitly api
• CAPI_API_KEY - capi api
• MARKETS_API_KEY - market api
• OFFERS_API_KEY - offer api

Adding new commands

Drop a script in /scripts starting with:

// Description:
//     ....
// Commands:
//     ....

Requirements

Node 6+