An Adapter-based Bot Framework for Elixir Applications
Hedwig is a chat bot, highly inspired by GitHub's Hubot.
See the online documentation for more information.
Hedwig was designed for 2 use-cases:
- A single, stand-alone OTP application.
- Included as a dependency of other OTP applications (or an umbrella).
You can spawn multiple bots at run-time with different configurations.
Check out enilsen16/awesome-hedwig for a curated list of adapters, responders, and other resources.
Hedwig ships with a console adapter to get you up and running quickly. It's great for testing how your bot will respond to the messages it receives.
To add Hedwig to an existing Elixir application, add :hedwig
to your list of
dependencies in your mix.exs
file:
defp deps do
[{:hedwig, "~> 1.0"}]
end
Update your applications list to include :hedwig
. This will ensure that the
Hedwig application, along with it's supervision tree is started when you start
your application.
def applications do
[applications: [:hedwig]]
end
Fetch the dependencies:
$ mix deps.get
Hedwig provides a convenient mix task to help you generate a basic robot module.
Run the following and follow the prompts:
$ mix hedwig.gen.robot
Welcome to the Hedwig Robot Generator!
Let's get started.
What would you like to name your bot?: alfred
Available adapters
1. Hedwig.Adapters.Console
Please select an adapter: 1
* creating lib/alfred
* creating lib/alfred/robot.ex
* updating config/config.exs
Don't forget to add your new robot to your supervision tree
(typically in lib/alfred.ex):
worker(Alfred.Robot, [])
defmodule Alfred.Robot do
use Hedwig.Robot, otp_app: :alfred
...
end
The generator will automatically generate a default configuration in
config/config.exs
. You will need to customize it further depending on the
adapter you will use.
This is mainly to setup the module to be compiled along with the adapter. An adapter can inject functionality into your module if needed.
# config/config.exs
config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.Console,
name: "alfred",
aka: "/",
responders: [
{Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
{Hedwig.Responders.Ping, []}
]
You can start your bot as part of your application's supervision tree or by using the supervision tree provided by Hedwig.
# add this to the list of your supervisor's children
worker(Alfred.Robot, [])
mix run --no-halt
Hedwig Console - press Ctrl+C to exit.
The console adapter is useful for quickly verifying how your
bot will respond based on the current installed responders.
scrogson> alfred help
alfred> alfred help <query> - Displays all help commands that match <query>.
alfred help - Displays all of the help commands that alfred knows about.
alfred: ping - Responds with 'pong'
scrogson>
# Start the bot via the module. The configuration options will be read in from
# config.exs
{:ok, pid} = Hedwig.start_robot(Alfred.Robot)
# You can also pass in a list of options that will override the configuration
# provided in config.exs (except for the adapter as that is compiled into the
# module).
{:ok, pid} = Hedwig.start_robot(Alfred.Robot, [name: "jeeves"])
If you want to start, stop, and send messages to your bot without keeping track
of its pid
, you can register your robot in the handle_connect/1
callback in
your robot module like so:
defmodule Alfred.Robot do
use Hedwig.Robot, otp_app: :alfred
def handle_connect(%{name: name} = state) do
if :undefined == :global.whereis_name(name) do
:yes = :global.register_name(name, self())
end
{:ok, state}
end
end
Process registration via Process.register/2
is simple. However, since the name
can only be an atom it may not work for all use-cases. If you are using the same
module for many robots, you'll need to reach for something more flexible like:
# Start the robot
Hedwig.start_robot(Alfred.Robot)
# Get the pid of the robot by name
pid = :global.whereis_name("alfred")
# Start a new robot with a different name
Hedwig.start_robot(Alfred.Robot, [name: "jeeves"])
# Get the pid
pid = :global.whereis_name("jeeves")
# Stop the robot
Hedwig.stop_robot(pid)
# Get the pid of the robot
pid = :global.whereis_name("alfred")
# Create a Hedwig message
msg = %Hedwig.Message{
type: "groupchat",
room: "[email protected]",
text: "hello world"
}
# Send the message
Hedwig.Robot.send(pid, msg)
Responders are processes that will handle incoming messages.
All that's needed is to use Hedwig.Responder
and use the hear/2
, or
respond/2
macros to define a pattern to listen for and how to respond in
the block when a message matches.
Here is an example:
defmodule MyApp.Responders.GreatSuccess do
@moduledoc """
Borat, Great Success!
Replies with a random link to a Borat image when a message contains
'great success'.
"""
use Hedwig.Responder
@links [
"http://mjanja.co.ke/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/borat_great_success.jpg",
"http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/13/1324dfd733535e58dba70264e6d05c9b70346204d2cacef65abef9c702746d1c.jpg",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r13riaRKGo0"
]
@usage """
<text> (great success) - Replies with a random Borat image.
"""
hear ~r/great success(!)?/i, msg do
reply msg, random(@links)
end
end
The two responder macros are use for different reasons:
hear
- matches messages containing the regular expressionrespond
- matches only when prefixed by your robot's configuredname
oraka
value.
Hedwig ships with a ExUnit-based module sepecifically made to test responders: Hedwig.RobotCase
.
In order to test the above responder, you need to create an ExUnit test case:
# test/my_app/responders/great_success_test.exs
defmodule MyApp.Responders.GreatSuccessTest do
use Hedwig.RobotCase
@tag start_robot: true, name: "alfred", responders: [{MyApp.Responders.GreatSuccess, []}]
test "great success - responds with a borat url", %{adapter: adapter, msg: msg} do
send adapter, {:message, %{msg | text: "great success"}}
assert_receive {:message, %{text: text}}
assert String.contains?(text, "http")
end
end
To run the tests, use mix test
The @usage
module attribute works nicely with Hedwig.Responders.Help
. If you
install the help handler, your bot will listen for <your-bots-nickname> help
and respond with a message containing all of the installed handlers @usage
text.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Sonny Scroggin
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.