🪴 Quartz 4.0

Chatbots in Mattermost

May 31, 20194 min read

- [[Mattermost]] was introduced in [2019 Unexplored Junior

  • tokoroten wanted to connect Vein, and it was decided that everyone should be Hackable anyway.

  • So now that everyone can connect to each other, I made a chatbot too.

  • Configure Incoming Webhook.

    • After setting it up, try throwing a request with curl.
    • $ curl -i -X POST -d 'payload={"text": "Japanese!"}' https://mattermost....
    • If set up correctly, it would look something like this
      • image
      • The profile image setting was not a file upload, but an image URL.

  • Set Slash Command.

    • I may not use it for the chatbot itself, but I’ll do this to take it step by step.
    • Do it on the server at hand to make it easier to see what’s going on.
    • $ python3 -m http.server
      • I set up an HTTP server on local port 8000.
      • Do it in a place where there is nothing to be seen because the files in the directory will be exposed.
    • $ ngrok http 8000
      • Tunneling to local port 8000 with [ngrok
      • Access http://***.ngrok.io/ in a browser and make sure you can see inside the directory
    • Slash command settings
      • Request URL: http://***.ngrok.io/
      • Request Method: GET
    • Now when I run the slash command, I see this request arrive at the server
      • GET /?channel_id=&channel_name=z-botplayground&command=%2Fnisbot&response_url=&team_domain=&team_id=&text=&token=&user_id=&user_name=nishio
    • http.server returns HTML for this request, ignoring parameters, listing the files in the directory
    • The HTML is displayed on Mattermost.
      • image
    • It is now confirmed that the server at hand and Mattermost can communicate with each other.
    • If you set the request method to POST, Mattermost will display
      • Command by `trigger ‘nisbot’ returned 501 Unsupported method (‘POST’) status.
      • and an error message appears. Reason that http.server returns 501 for POST

  • Configure Outgoing Webhook.

from flask import Flask
import json
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/", methods=["POST"])
def hello():
    return json.dumps(dict(text="hello"))

    - `$ FLASK_APP=server.py flask run --port 8000`
        - Server started.
        - The only reason I'm specifying port 8000 is to avoid starting ngrok again by aligning it with http.server.
    - Now when I talk to him, he responds with hello.
        - ![image](https://gyazo.com/eb4d211c9ee896d8505666b6b7d02562/thumb/1000)

- I want to handle parameters anyway because it's no fun to reply with a fixed string every time.
    - What name the parameter is passed by is written in 8 of this.
        - [Outgoing Webhooks — Mattermost 5.11 documentation](https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-outgoing.html)

python

from flask import Flask, request
import json
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/", methods=["POST"])
def hello():
    username = request.form["user_name"]
    text = request.form["text"]
    reply = f"{username} typed "{text}""
    return json.dumps(dict(text=reply))

    - ![image](https://gyazo.com/3f673f2cac3dc5767099cd698a3d35c7/thumb/1000)
    - Failure notes on the creation process
        - I forgot the request in `from flask import Flask, request` and got a 500 Internal Server Error.
        - 400 Bad Request is generated when "username" is used instead of "user_name".
        - 400 even if the content type is changed from the default urlencoded to json.
            - ![image](https://gyazo.com/b77eb98b3c5771f95a8ee21a95ae25e2/thumb/1000)

This time, I worked up to the point of creating a bot on the server at hand. Personally, I’d like to try AWS Lambda next.

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/Mattermostでチャットボット using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.

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