TUM CS Bot

An interactive bot for zulip.in.tum.de, the Zulip Chat of the Department of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich.

Note: This bot is currently under development and not yet production-ready!

setup

• The bot is intended to run as Generic bot, owned by an administrator.
  • add a bot
  • about bots
• Get the bot's zuliprc file. Per default, it is expected to be located right in the root of the bot's git repo.
• Configure supervisor (used by Zulip installations per default) to handle the bot by placing the configuration file zulip_tumcsbot.conf in /etc/supervisor/conf.d.

Note: For some commands such as subscribe or solved the bot needs administrator rights. (Zulip Security model #Users and bots). In order to grant those rights, run

• ./manage.py change_user_role -r REALM_ID <bot_email> admin (Zulip >= 4.0)

in the appropriate directory of your zulip server installation.

usage (docker)

• docker compose up: run tumcsbot
• docker compose -f docker-compose.debug.yml up: run tumcsbot in debug mode

usage

• make init: create the database tumcsbot.db and install a virtual environment into venv
• make run: run tumcsbot
• make debug: run tumcsbot in debug mode

You can also run the bot manually:

usage: main.py [-h] [-t N] [-d] [-l LOGFILE] ZULIPRC DB_PATH

TUM CS Bot - a generic Zulip bot.

This bot is currently especially intended for administrative tasks.
It supports several commands which can be written to the bot using
a private message or a message starting with @mentioning the bot.

positional arguments:
  ZULIPRC               zuliprc file containing the bot's configuration
  DB_PATH               path to the bot's database

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t N, --threads N     maximum number of threads to use to run the plugins (default: 8)
  -d, --debug           debugging mode switch
  -l LOGFILE, --logfile LOGFILE
                        use LOGFILE for logging output

usage in chat

Write the word help to the bot - as private message or using @<tumcsbot-name> help. It will tell you how you can use it. :-)

notes

My work on the possibility of accessing a file that the sender has added to a message using the "Attach files" function and my questions about this topic on chat.zulip.org have led to the corresponding issue on github: zulip/python-zulip-api#628

The bot supports a dynamic plugin infrastructure and also generates the help message dynamically by using appropriate attributes every plugin has to provide.

In order to apply database migration scripts conveniently, there is the script src/migrate.py (see also make migrations).

additional make targets

• make tests runs some unit tests. (You can also use pytest.)
• make mypy runs mypy --strict and should not show any issue.
• make static_analysis currently runs mypy and pylint.
• make migrations applies the migrations in migrations.sql to the database tumcsbot.db using the script src/migrate.py.

model

Note that the tumcsbot.client.Client class inherits from the original zulip.Client, which has been left out of the class diagram for the sake of simplicity.