Redis Backplane for Hubots | Hacker News Reader

Redis Backplane for Hubots

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13 pointsjoeyguerra10 comments

hubot is still an active project??

i haven’t heard much about it since pre-slack era… does anyone here still use it?

I used it in ~2018-2020 on Slack (as well as waaay back on Campfire), and it was showing its age. The Node ecosystem, for all its faults, has come a long way since Hubot was created, and working with Hubot felt dated. I believe the original was written in CoffeScript!

That said, if all you want is a few quick scripts hooked up to chat, it's still pretty low effort. Alternatives require a fair bit more setup, and while they're better for it, maybe you don't need that.

I’m still using Hubot. What are these alternatives you refer to?

Can't remember for sure, but when I was scoping out Hubot in 2018 for my then team, there were a few bot frameworks – one in Python that looked promising but more complicated.

I think https://github.com/microsoft/botbuilder-python was one of them, I think there were a few others.

Would you care to share what you use it for? Im just super curious because it seems like the industry moved on from chatops and hubot around 2017.

We used it back in the day as well for some non-essential stuff. This post caused me to dig into where hubot stands. It looks like gijoeyguerra upgraded the code to ESM: https://github.com/hubotio/hubot and also wrote/upgraded the adapters for Slack, Teams, etc: https://github.com/hubot-friends

It would be cool to see this get legs again. If nothing else, a maintained cross-platform, hackable bot framework is useful! This caused me to do some more searching, and I stumbled across: https://joeyguerra.com/blog/2023/resuscitating-hubot.html

Nice work joeyguerra!

Thanks. It’s been cool to work on it.

When I left GitHub in 2022 it was still heavily used for so many things. Unsure if it's still in use there today but it wouldn't surprise me.

I have confirmed that at least three people are using it. I don’t trust npm download numbers.

I personally use it a lot for the same use cases people use postman.

Leveraged Redis Consumer Groups to create a backplane for Hubots - enabling horizontally scaling Hubot instances.

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