Chatops

Hubot Testing Revisted (Again): Hubot 11

I’ve decided to upgrade the hubot-command-mapper and the bot-zero projects to ESM, just like Hubot 11. This blog will focus on how to upgrade the unit tests. In that sense it is a short rewrite of Hubot testing revisited.

Improving responsiveness of hubot-grafana

We 🧡 the combination of Grafana, Hubot & Slack. We use it all the time to visualize dashboards in Slack. But the interaction with certain dashboards might not be as fast as one expect from a chat bot, so let’s see what we can do.

Hubot testing revisited

So far I’ve been using the hubot-pretend package for the testing of the hubot-command-mapper. But as that test package is no longer maintained / updated, I wanted to switch to something that is more in line with what Hubot itself does: hubot-mock-adapter.

Grafana, I want slugs back for my Hubot! 😭

At Wehkamp, we use the Hubot Grafana project to make our Grafana dashboard available in Slack. It mainly helps our standby team to make quick assessments on what’s going on with our website. Last year, we saw we could not upgrade the package from 2.5.2 to 3.0.1, because slugs could not be used anymore. But we use slugs and… quite heavily! So we did not upgrade our Grafana v7… until we got hit by the input field bug. We decided to see what we could do to bring our slug feature back to our ChatOps bot!

Don’t use Slack Incoming WebHooks; App Creation is Dead Simple!

At Wehkamp we ❤️ Slack! Seriously, in order to improve our efficiency, we’ve connected many of our applications, alerts and dashboards to Slack channels. But, as with all things, there is a right way and a wrong way of integrating a webhook at enterprise level.

Let’s explore how easy it is to create an application.

Simple Python code to send messages to a Slack channel (without packages)

Last week I was working on a Databricks script that needed to produce a Slack message as its final outcome. I lifted some code that used a Slack client that was PIP-installed. Unfortunately, I could not use the package on my cluster. Fortunately, the Slack API is so simple, that you don’t really need a package to post a simple message to a channel. In this blog I’ll show you the simplest way of producing awesome messages in Slack.

Building an updatable Slack message

Slack is fully awesome. At Wehkamp we use it for our internal communication and as a tool for our DevOps. The Slack API allows us to build even more advanced integrations. In this blog I’ll explore how to use the API to create powerful progress indicators by updating a Slack message.

Jump-starting Slack bot projects: bot-zero

To give teams a jump start we’ve created the bot-zero open source project. It solves some setup and development problems. In this blog I’ll show how to get up and running in minutes and I’ll explain some of the choices we’ve made.

Cleaning up the default Hubot Slack installation

If you set up a new Hubot using the Slack Developer Kit for Hubot you’ll get an awesome bot, but with a lot of useless stuff in it. In this blog I’ll outline all the things that can be safely cleaned up. The scripts can run on both Powershell (Windows) and Bash (Linux/Mac).

Hubot + ES6 + Promises

Lately we’ve been playing around with ChatOps at Wehkamp. We added a Hubot to our Slack channels to automate some operational jobs. It makes work more fun and way easier. As it is hosted in our own infrastructure, it can interact with our micro-services. In this article I explore how to use ES6 and a Promise to implement a call to a simple web-service.