The commands the servant answers to are already discussed in the user area.

Introduction

The servant is a hubot chatbot that uses the hubot-slack adapter to interact with DETI’s Slack.

It runs in Node.js and accepts scripts in either coffeescript or javascript.

The repo which hosts the projects code is dml-servant.

To interact with slack, the bot needs a secret token generated at the department’s slack page.

Besides answering to the already mentioned commands, the bot is also capable of periodically checking a set of endpoints and reporting their results (through slack).

The logged user’s email is used to request information from the wiki (which in turn also uses the same email). This makes transparent (to the user) the integration of both services.

Details

The following details are given per directory or file of the repo.

assets/

This directory includes relevant files for the bot’s execution.

The most useful one is endpoints.txt, which includes a set of endpoints to periodically try to reach.

lib/constants.js

Defines constants used through the rest of the code.

The most relevant portion of it is included:

DML_NM_HOST: '192.168.1.128',
DML_NM_PORT: '22',
DML_NM_URL: 'http://127.0.0.1:5000',
DML_NM_USERNAME: 'dml-datacenter',

DML_DEV_API_HOST: '188.166.77.53',
DML_DEV_SSL_CERT: fs.readFileSync('assets/nginx-selfsigned_dev.crt', {encoding: 'utf-8'}),

DML_PING_CHANNEL: '#makerlab-reports',
DML_PING_ENDPOINTS: 'assets/endpoints.txt',
DML_PING_MIN_PATTERN: '*/30',  // every 30 minutes

DML_PRIVATE_KEY: fs.readFileSync('assets/id_rsa'),
DML_SSL_CERT: fs.readFileSync('assets/nginx-selfsigned.crt', {encoding: 'utf-8'})

• DML_NM_* constants relevant to the bot’s interaction with the network manager.
• DML_DEV_* define constants used when referencing the development server.
• DML_PING_* constants used regarding the “test endpoints” function.
• DML_PRIVATE_KEY key used by the bot in ssh sessions.
• DML_SSL_CERT certificate the bot expects from the main server.

scripts/crontab.js

Handles testing endpoints in a cron-like approach.

Non of its methods are callable from the outside world, since they only output information.

scripts/projects.js

Contains functions regarding projects.

Currently one chat listener is registered, which is used to display information about the logged user’s projects.

scripts/network.js

The main script used by the bot.

All the network endpoints registered in the bot are written in this file.

Major warning

The way the servant authenticates with the network, for security reasons, is through ssh. This means that the servant effectively ssh’s into the machine running the network’s server in order to issue requests.

This is transparent to the developers by the use of http-ssh-agent, which enables the creation of an agent used to proxy requests.

setup/

A directory containing information/scripts on how to generate the initial version of the bot.