Automata

Discord bot handling the management of the MUN Computer Science Society Discord server

For feature requests / help getting the bot running, don't fret to ask questions in the #automata channel in the guild!

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Running locally

1. Clone the project by running https://github.com/MUNComputerScienceSociety/Automata.git, and change into the directory by running cd ./Automata
2. Copy .env.dist to .env
3. Fill out the required information in the .env
   • At the moment, the only required environment variable required is AUTOMATA_TOKEN, which is a Discord token, which you can see how to get here

Note about running locally and avoiding spam:

When this bot was smaller, it wasn't so bad to run all the plugins; but since we have 40+, and some of them do some data fetching / loading on startup, so the logs can get a bit loud.

If you're working on a plugin, you can add its name to the AUTOMATA_ENABLED_PLUGINS env. var (like AUTOMATA_ENABLED_PLUGINS=PluginName), and it will be the only plugin that will be loaded.

This is a comma-delimited list as well, so you can enable multiple plugins at once.

Locally Using Docker

1. Create the directory mounted_plugins within the project by running mkdir ./mounted_plugins
2. Start the containers by running docker-compose up -d

Locally Without Docker

1. Run MongoDB

   You can use Docker for running MongoDB (recommended), just add the following to the docker-compose.yml file to expose it to your local machine

     ...
     mongo:
       ...
       ports:
         - "127.0.0.1:27017:27017"
     ...

   And start it only by running docker-compose up -d mongo

2. Install the requirements found in the requirements.txt file using pip install -r requirements.txt

   • Using a virtual environment is highly recommended, this section of the Flask documentation explains this well.

3. Run the bot using python Bot.py

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Developing your own plugins

• Automata is built around the discord.py framework, therefore the plugins make heavy use of its decorators to abstract most of the complexity behind the scenes.

Developing using Docker

1. Create the folder mounted_plugins if it doesn't already exist
   • plugins is baked into the image when it is built, so editing files there won't have an effect
2. Create a new plugin within the mounted_plugins folder
   1. Create a new Jigsaw plugin manifest
      • You can use plugins/Ping/plugin.json as an example
   2. Create a new plugin
      • You can use plugins/Ping/__init__.py as an example
3. Start the bot using the instructions from Running locally

When you make changes to your plugins, restart the Automata container using docker-compose restart automata

Developing without Docker

1. Create a new plugin, following the directions above within 'Using Docker', but within the plugins folder instead
2. Start the bot using the instructions from Running locally

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Developing the bot core and built-in plugins

Developing core using Docker

1. Edit the docker-compose.yml, replacing the image: muncs/automata line for the automata container with build: .
2. Edit the bot core or the plugins as you wish
3. Start the container, forcing a rebuild of the image using docker-compose up -d --build

Developing core without Docker

1. Just edit the core files / plugins directly :)
2. Start the bot using the instructions from Running locally

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Pushing changes to GitHub

1. Fork this repository, clone your fork, and commit your changes to a branch on your fork
2. Create a PR to merge your branch into the master branch here, and make sure to tag an executive / mention the PR in Discord so we see it
3. We'll likely request some changes before it is merged
4. Once it's good, a few minutes after the PR is merged the feature should be live, since Automata uses CI/CD :)

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Container responsibilities

Automata is comprised of a number of containers, each with distinct responsibilities. Their responsibilities are as follows:

Container	Responsibilities
automata	The Discord bot itself
mongo	A MongoDB server used to provide persistent data storage to the automata container