Whistler

Whistler, also called Xeno, was the astromech droid of Corran Horn. It was the same R-series model as the legendary R2-D2.

Whistler is based on GitHub's Campfire bot, hubot. He's pretty cool.

Playing with Whistler

You'll need to install the necessary dependencies for Whistler. Almost all of those dependencies are provided by npm

(You need to install redis on your own, or brew install redis).

% bin/hubot

You'll see some startup output about where your scripts come from.

Loading deploy-local scripts at /Users/me/nubot/scripts
Loading hubot core scripts for relative scripts at /Users/me/nubot/src/hubot/scripts
Hubot: the Shell.
{ id: '1', name: 'Shell' }
Loading hubot-scripts from /Users/me/nubot/hubot-scripts.json
Successfully connected to Redis

Then you can interact with Whistler by typing /help.

/help

animate me <query>  - The same thing as `image me`, except adds a few
convert me <expression> to <units> - Convert expression to given units.
help - Displays all of the help commands that Hubot knows about.
...

Take a look at the scripts in the ./scripts folder for examples. Delete any scripts you think are silly. Add whatever functionality you want Whistler to have.

Deployment

% heroku create --stack cedar
% git push heroku master
% heroku ps:scale app=1
% heroku addons:add redistogo:nano

You'll need to edit the Procfile to say what the bot's name is.

Whistler also needs three environmental variables set to run and to keep him running on heroku.

Campfire Variables

Create a separate user for your bot and get their token from the web UI.

% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_TOKEN="..."

Get the numeric ids of the rooms you want the bot to join, comma delimited. If you want the bot to connect to https://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com/room/42 and https://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com/room/1024 then you'd add it like this:

% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_ROOMS="447885"

Add the subdomain hubot should connect to. If you web URL looks like http://mysubdomain.campfirenow.com then you'd add it like this:

% heroku config:add HUBOT_CAMPFIRE_ACCOUNT="athega"

Restarting Whistler

You may want to get comfortable with heroku logs and heroku restart if you're having issues.