Implementing ChatOps Using Open Source Tooling

ChatOps is an exciting proposition for organizational Ops communication. Throwing development and operational tooling into the chat conversation can ease the development pipeline, increase transparency and increase security by streamlining bug detection and remediation efforts.

At the heart of ChatOps are bots, scripts and chat clients; many are pre-built and open source. In this article, we’ll review a completely open source method for building out your ChatOps setup. We’ll cover integrating with Hubot, using CoffeeScript commands, and how building custom scripts can ignite ChatOps in your own environment.

Why Open Source for ChatOps?

Many arguments have been given as to the benefits of open source. Building upon open source inherently evades vendor lock-in, enabling more security and service longevity. Furthermore, to avoid reinventing the wheel, forking existing open source ChatOps projects naturally will be more efficient than purely greenfield initiatives.

Open Source Chatbots

There are many Chatbots available for use; each with unique capabilities, varying types of integrations out of the -box, and different ways to extend functionality with custom scripts. Take Lita, for example, an open source chatbot built with Ruby. It works with IRC, HipChat and Campfire. Many other open source chatbot options exist, such as Errbot, Jarvis and Lazlo.

Example: Hubot

By far the most adopted open source ChatOps companion is Hubot. Designed and open sourced by Github, Hubot takes market share in the ChatOps discussion. Described as “a customizable, life betterment robot,” Hubot is written in Node.js and takes commands with CoffeeScript.

Using Hubot, developers can initiate commands with Hubot scripts to perform actions such as post images, translate languages and integrate with maps, but also initiate vital commands to your favorite DevOps cloud tools. A full catalog of scripts can be found here, and it’s quite easy to craft your own CoffeeScript commands as well.

Example Hubot Scripts

The community scripts that support Hubot are similarly open source, meaning that you can repackage these implementations to suit your own needs. Let’s take a look through the catalog of Github-supported Hubot scripts to see what sort of pre-constructed extensions we can seamlessly add to a Hubot environment.

With Hubot, you can ping your major cloud development platforms, such as Heroku. Some example commands for returning status of issues on Heroku include:

hubot heroku status - Returns the current Heroku status for app operations and toolshubot heroku status issues <limit> - Returns a list of recent <limit> issues (default limit is 5)hubot heroku status issue <id> - Returns a single issue by ID number

Or perhaps you want to conveniently check PagerDuty from your chat client to see who is on call within your incident response team, or to gather details on current incidents. Hubout has a script for that. Using pagerduty.coffee, some example requests might be:

hubot who's on call - return the username of who's on callhubot pager me trigger <msg> - create a new incident with <msg>hubot pager me incidents - return the current incidentshubot pager me notes <incident> - show notes for incident #<incident>hubot pager me problems - return all open incidents

Another example could be direct interaction with the Twilio API for sending SMS. Using sms.coffee you can initiate a command with the following syntax:

hubot sms <to> <message> - Sends <message> to the number <to>

Configuring sms.coffee is easy, all you need to insert are:

HUBOT_SMS_SIDHUBOT_SMS_TOKENHUBOT_SMS_FROM

Of course, there is no shortage of Gifs, cat memes, and other scripts to add some humor to your workday, such as mustache insertion using image detection.

Generating Your Own Hubot Scripts

Aside from using third party scripts, you can always craft your own. To be an executable Hubot script, your code must be in .coffee or .js, and it must be in the correct directory (src/scripts and scripts by default). It must also export a function, as in the following:

module.exports = (robot) -># your code here

Essentially, Hubot listens to all chat communication; it will hear commands and respond accordingly. To configure what it must hear in regards to your script, you must specify what to listen for, and what to respond with. For example:

module.exports = (robot) ->robot.hear /badger/i, (res) -># your code hererobot.respond /open the pod bay doors/i, (res) -># your code here

For further details, see the documentation on Scripting here.

Getting The Most of Chatbots

Once integrated into a chat platform such as Slack, your chatbot configuration can truly thrive. Given the wide breadth of community generated and Github-maintained scripts, DevOps teams have near unlimited potential for uniting their tooling into a single, human-readable CLI. Another benefit of choosing open source tools for such projects is that you can detach your bot and integrate with whatever chat client you prefer.

ChatOps can add fun and efficiency to the remote workspace. We’ve covered high-level methods for adopting this into your team’s space, and hopefully, a helpful foundation into the power of open source for streamlining the power of ChatOps.

— Bill Doerrfeld