Setting up Hubot

So this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now and I’ve finally gotten around to it. I have Github’s Hubot running on a dedicated Ubuntu 16.04 VM using Slack as it’s user interface.

Create API Key

The Hubot interface needs access to the Slack API. This is granted through a bot API token.

1. Log into Slack via the web portal and browse to new bot page.
2. Enter a username for your bot and click ‘Add bot integration’
3. Copy the API tocken for later use.

Install Prerequisites

Hubot runs on coffeescript (javascript). It also needs a Redis database for persistance.

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential nodejs tcl redis-server

Create Your Hubot

First we need a user to run the Hubot instance

sudo useradd --home /opt/hubot hubot

Next we install the Hubot generator

sudo npm install -g hubot coffee-script yo generator-hubot

Finally we can create the Hubot

cd /opt/hubot
sudo su - hubot
yo hubot

Run hubot

HUBOT_SLACK_TOKEN=xoxb-1234-5678-91011-00e4dd ./bin/hubot --adapter slack

Jump onto slack and invite hubot into general. Confirm it works by typing @hubot help
You can run Hubot in the background using the likes of tmux or screen. Alternitively, you could run it as a daemon, however, I haven’t had any luck with that.