Universal Blue ChatOps

okay so I keep thinking about this bot thing. What if we had like:

# show count of PRs, issues, etc in a neofetch like fashion
ubluectl status 

# approve pr 56 for main 
ubluectl pr —approve main/56

# trigger GitHub  workflows 
ubluectl trigger-workflow main/build.yml

# show count of PRs, issues, etc in a neofetch like fashion
ubluectl status 

# approve pr 56 for main 
ubluectl pr —approve main/56

# trigger GitHub  workflows 
ubluectl trigger-workflow main/build.yml

Let’s make this a bot thread 🧵

50 Replies

akdevOP•15mo ago

What feature do we want/need in a bot?

xyny•15mo ago

ubluectl makes it seem like a cli-thing discord has the /slash commands now couldn't it be like

akdevOP•15mo ago

It can’t be slash because it will conflict with discord stuff

xyny•15mo ago

/status, /trigger-workflow, /pr slash commands are the new "correct" way to make discord bots, though could have a prefix to prevent collisions

akdevOP•15mo ago

Oh then I can do that but it would be /ubluectl status

xyny•15mo ago

i guess hold on, i'm googling how other bots do it

akdevOP•15mo ago

The one on fedora server uses .command

xyny•15mo ago

yeah, a lot of bots use .cmd !cmd etc too but with slash commands we get that fancy autocomplete no need for .help https://discord.com/blog/slash-commands-are-here

akdevOP•15mo ago

the problem with that is that it seems very easy to create conflicts

xyny•15mo ago

other bots just have /command

akdevOP•15mo ago

Eg: /status

xyny•15mo ago

/status there's no /status in discord by default if we don't add other bots we can use /status

akdevOP•15mo ago

Yeah but if two bots implement /status I guess you get two responses

xyny•15mo ago

i'd guess discord would handle that better because slash commands are a discord feature, not just parsing messages that people send maybe in the dialog that opens when you type / you need to select the correct one?

akdevOP•15mo ago

mm not sure what this discord commands feature actually does I would prefer parsing messages because it is more flexible but need to see what the discord commands do

xyny•15mo ago

it's just like parsing messages, but you get autocomplete and descriptions of the different fields

Lina•15mo ago

multiple bots can have the same command name with slash commands, youre able to choose between what command you actually intend to use

akdevOP•15mo ago

There's limitations like this

akdevOP•15mo ago

mm need to see what it means

xyny•15mo ago

at least https://discordjs.guide/creating-your-bot/slash-commands.html in discord.js creating slash commands seems pretty easy i don't think we'd cross 100, but this depends on if what we'd want is CHAT_INPUT or MESSAGE

akdevOP•15mo ago

Whats the difference?

xyny•15mo ago

no idea

Lina•15mo ago

slash commands have the advantages of 1. showing a little tooltip describing the command and 2. suggesting command completions

akdevOP•15mo ago

I’ll probably just use message parsing at least at the beginning because it’s very easy

Lina•15mo ago

heres what it looks like on mobile

xyny•15mo ago

i wouldn't go for worse UX because it's a bit easier to develop

akdevOP•15mo ago

Going from message parsing to slash commands is a lot easier than the reverse

xyny•15mo ago

CHAT_INPUT is the one (https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application-commands), the others are for context menus

akdevOP•15mo ago

plus I need a working CLI anyway to test locally

Lina•15mo ago

usually people make personal discord servers for testing

xyny•15mo ago

you can test with a test discord server do you have experience making discord bots?

akdevOP•15mo ago

I do have a testing server It’s still not really ideal if I have to open my web browser to test stuff

xyny•15mo ago

i always just keep the web browser on the side, for googling stuff and such. you can just have the discord server open there and type in the commands you wanna test. i don't see the issue

akdevOP•15mo ago

To make a code change I would have to: 1. Make a code change, rebuild/reinstall application 2. Go to web browser and type on discord vs: npm build && npm run ubluectl I prefer tight feedback loops I guess I could automate something with the discord API itself to send the message but this is more work

xyny•15mo ago

if you do npm build && npm run ubluectl i presume that would connect to discord and host the bot temporarily on your local machine. with that, it's just the difference between writing the commands in the same textbox or writing them in a discord window on the side plus if you want to have a cli for testing don't you need to build a cli

akdevOP•15mo ago

yeah and it is very easy to do and very easy to reuse the work to implement other interfaces

xyny•15mo ago

and of course you can just use console.log() for debugging and the logs would just be in your console window i don't see how using slash commands would be any more work for you (and other developers working on the project in the future) (unless you are already very familiar with the other ways of doing things), while not using slash commands makes the UX worse

akdevOP•15mo ago

unless you are very familiar with the other ways of doing things

Yes.

xyny•15mo ago

so you have experience writing discord bots. i asked that earlier and thought you brushed it off.

akdevOP•15mo ago

I have experience writing software incrementally. Not discord bots specifically. I build software to work on cloud different compute platforms (ECS/EC2/EKS/Lambda) transparently - I just build a CLI first for fast feedback loops and create interfaces for each compute platform so I can build core functionality first and focus on the interface later For example it’s not really that important if the application is triggered by ubluectl status or

{
  “command”: [“status”]
}

{
  “command”: [“status”]
}

90% of the work will be the same so I’d rather start with the former so I don’t have to figure out how to test and interact with discord commands and I can just focus on interacting with GitHub, etc Ultimately the code will run AWS lambda and needs to take in a post request so probably discord commands is totally the way

xyny•15mo ago

i don't have anything against you building a cli first, i was just arguing that you should use slash commands. but cool to hear that you weren't as against that as i read you as being.

akdevOP•15mo ago

You brought up good points! But at this stage I would like to focus more on the things we want to do vs implementation details

j0rge•15mo ago

Just off the top of my head real quick: kick off a build in any repo, with the ability to just rebuild everything in one go in order. show any PRs older than X days notify the dev channel if the build is broken for over X days

xyny•15mo ago

oh and a (useless) bonus feature, pretty complicated, if you've linked your github account to your discord account it could give CONTRIB if you have a commit in any ublue-os repository

akdevOP•15mo ago

What’s CONTRIB?

Gerblesh•15mo ago

It's the discord role

akdevOP•15mo ago

Oh I see that’d be cool

$ poetry run ubluebot --help       
usage: ubluebot [-h] {status,pr-approve,trigger-workflow} ...

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

commands:
  valid commands for ubluebot

  {status,pr-approve,trigger-workflow}
                        pass one of these commands to get the ubluebot output
    status              check out the status of the project
    pr-approve          approve a pending PR
    trigger-workflow    trigger a github workflow
                    
 $ poetry run ubluebot status --help              
usage: ubluebot status [-h] [-i] [-spr] [-rw] [-f {json,human,discord}]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i, --issues          list issue metrics
  -spr, --stale-pr      show stale pull requests
  -rw, --running-workflows
                        show running and pending workflows across the organization
  -f {json,human,discord}, --format {json,human,discord}
                        output format

$ poetry run ubluebot --help       
usage: ubluebot [-h] {status,pr-approve,trigger-workflow} ...

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

commands:
  valid commands for ubluebot

  {status,pr-approve,trigger-workflow}
                        pass one of these commands to get the ubluebot output
    status              check out the status of the project
    pr-approve          approve a pending PR
    trigger-workflow    trigger a github workflow
                    
 $ poetry run ubluebot status --help              
usage: ubluebot status [-h] [-i] [-spr] [-rw] [-f {json,human,discord}]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i, --issues          list issue metrics
  -spr, --stale-pr      show stale pull requests
  -rw, --running-workflows
                        show running and pending workflows across the organization
  -f {json,human,discord}, --format {json,human,discord}
                        output format

I started work on this yesterday night, the end usage would be like /status --issues --stale-pr --running-workflows or maybe separate commands idk how discord commands are supposed to work yet

xyny•15mo ago

i don't think you're supposed to do --param, i think all the params are positioned and given names and autocomplete values, so it'd probably be more like /status [type:][issues/pr/workflows] with [] being hints discord gives to the user and the code just getting the value as {type: "issues"} or {type: ["issues", "prs"]}. actually i'm not sure there's an autocomplete at all

akdevOP•15mo ago

How to pass parameters to a GitHub command? Positional parameters are hard to remember for me

xyny•15mo ago

discord tells you the name of the positional parameter you are currently writing, for some things it might be more suited for named params and that might need to be a custom implementation which is not ideal

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