riethmayer / flowdock_cli

To execute our bb CLI from within Flowdock.

flowdock bb tool integration

We use a CLI to deploy, restart or get an overview of our queues:

bb queues top
bb deploy briefkasten
bb restart fbnot

The goal was to allow us doing all this from our mobile clients without always having your computer with you during pager-duty to do small maintenance jobs.

Inspired by message passing from recent Elixir talks, I use shell pipes to pass messages between processes. This example is a bit contrived, but fun.

flowdock_stream

This tool listenes on a particular flowdock stream with a defined regular expression to catch our bb invocations and ouputs the json to the shell, where it can be picked up by another piped command.

shell_command

This is an example of how we process data, transform it with the outcome of the shell command and pay it forward.

flowdock_response

This sends data back to the particular bb tool invocation back in the chat, by receiving data from the shell_command and the thread_id from the flowdock_stream.

Example

# flowdock_bb.sh
export flowdock_token=YOUR_TOKEN
export flowdock_flow=YOUR_FLOW
export flowdock_regexp="^bb "
export flowdock_organization=YOUR_ORGANIZATION

./bin/flowdock_stream | ./bin/shell_command | ./flowdock_response \
| jq "." >> /var/log/flowdock_bb_invocations.log

TODO

• add wrapper script for bastion server
• make sure it's always running