civibot

Slack app for the CiviForm workspace. This is designed to be run in a specific EC2 instance.

Setup

Prerequisites

1. EC2 instance with Ubuntu 24.04 (probably works fine on others, but this is what it's using now).
2. Create a user called civibot with sudo access, using /bin/bash for the shell.
3. Install make, nodejs, npm, git, unzip.
4. Install the AWS CLI
5. In IAM (not IAM Identity Center), create a civibot user. Create an access key for the user.
6. On the host, run aws configure, providing the access key and secret.
7. Requires SLACK_BOT_TOKEN, SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET, and SLACK_APP_TOKEN secrets in AWS Secrets Manager. a. Each secret should have the given name, and the actual key in the secret should also be the given name, with the value being the Slack secret value. It should also have a tag called name with the value being the secret name. b. Create a policy in AWS that allows the secretsmanager:GetSecretValue permission on the ARNs for the three secrets (note that the ARN looks like arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-1:<account id>:secret:SLACK_BOT_TOKEN-<random string> so you will probably want to use SLACK_BOT_TOKEN-* in the resource definition), as well as secretsmanager:ListSecrets for all resources ("*"). c. Apply the policy to the civibot user.
8. The civibot_github key should be in /home/civibot/.ssh with mode 0600. You can get this key from Nick.
9. /home/civibot/.ssh/config should have the following contents:

Host github.com
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/civibot_github
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Running

1. Clone the repo.
2. Run make install. This will install a service that runs the bot.
3. Tail the log in /home/civibot/civibot/logs/civibot.log to ensure there are no errors.

Development

You can deploy a different branch of the civibot repo by using the !deploy command. You must be in either #civibot-admin or #civibot-test to do this, and must be on the list of CiviBot admins. If you get things stuck with the app unable to start on the new branch, contact Nick to SSH into the node and fix it (or do so yourself if you have the SSH key). There is also a !restart command in case things get weird, but it's still responding to commands.

You will need node version 18+. This is currently running on 18, but probably works fine with later versions.

Run npm install from the root of the repo to install dependencies. Run make fmt to format your code before submitting a PR.

After merging a PR, run !deploy latest in #civibot-admin to deploy your changes.

Tips

• If you want to be able to have CiviBot respond in whatever context it was triggered in (channel, DM, thread), use context.say instead of just say. If you need to respond with custom blocks (see the xkcd script), use the regular say.
• Create a help hash that maps command names to help text. Then, export both this and a setup function that does the actual meat of the script. These two things are automatically loaded by the app.