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
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.
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.
hubot is still an active project??
i haven’t heard much about it since pre-slack era… does anyone here still use it?
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!
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.
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.
Leveraged Redis Consumer Groups to create a backplane for Hubots - enabling horizontally scaling Hubot instances.