Butler

Butler is a simple slack bot designed to make your life easier. He's a swell guy.

Creating your own Butler

You can install the butler archive with this command:

$ mix archive.install https://github.com/butlerbot/butler/releases/download/v0.6.0/butler_new-0.6.0.ez

Once you've done that you can generate your robot. For instance, if you want to name your robot marvin then you would run:

$ mix butler.new marvin
$ cd marvin
$ mix deps.get
$ mix run --no-halt

Congratulations! You now have your own butler.

Butler comes with a default configuration, which can be updated in config/config.exs or config/ENV.exs per environment.

Plugins

Plugins give Butler abilities. They provide a simple api for listening for specific commands.

Adapters

Butler has adapters in order to talk to multiple chat platforms. The default platform is Slack and an adapter is provided as a part of Butler.

For local development there is a terminal adapter which provides a lightweight repl interface.

Slack Adapter

Butler needs a slack api token in order to connect to your organization.

$ export BUTLER_SLACK_API_KEY=your_api_key

You can then run butler in production mode.

$ MIX_ENV=prod mix compile
$ MIX_ENV=prod mix run --no-halt

Deploying to Heroku

Heroku is the easiest way to deploy your bot:

First you'll need to create a new application with the elixir buildpack:

$ heroku create --buildpack "https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir.git"

Or if you've already created your application you can set the buildpack directly:

$ heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL="https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir.git"

Before you deploy you need to set any environment variables that you'll need. For the slack adapter that will be this:

$ heroku config:set BUTLER_SLACK_API_KEY=your-api-key

You'll also have to make sure that any variables you need at compile time are included in the elixir_buildpack.config file:

$ cat elixir_buildpack.config
erlang_version=17.5
elixir_version=1.1.1
always_rebuild=true
config_vars_to_export=(BUTLER_SLACK_API_KEY BUTLER_SLACK_API_KEY)

If these config vars aren't included in the config_vars_to_export then they won't be availble during compile time which will cause issues during runtime.

For more information on configuration you can check out the elixir_buildpack.

Once the configuration variables have been set its time to push:

$ git push heroku master

You should see a lot of logging and after your bot should be up and running.

If you have any issues you can review the heroku logs:

$ heroku logs

Your bot should now be deployed!

Deploying to Unix

There are a number of ways to deploy to unix. The recommended way is to create a release of Butler with exrm and run the release on your vps or server of choice.

Contributing

Butler is still a work in progress and we appreciate any contributions. If you have questions then feel free to open an issue.