Chat

DevOps is all about culture and teams efficiently deploying and managing software. Using Chat software is a great way to help the cultural and social side of DevOps.

There are various types of Chat software like IRC, Slack, HipChat, Campfire and so forth.

In Fabric8 we recommend the use of Lets Chat and we also suggest runnning hubot, an open source chat bot along with it. Combining these two together enables extensible automation along with the all important communication channels that are required to take features from ideas through to running in a live environment, whilst also establishing those all important feedback loops.

Fabric8 comes with a hubot app and a notification engine to post build completion events to a chat room (which defaults to one room per kubernetes namespace).

Installation

To install the Chat app please see the Install Fabric8 on OpenShift Guide. Chat is included as a stand alone app or included in the Continuous Delivery, iPaaS and Kitchen Sink apps.

Once you have completed the above you should see the Chat item on the navigation bar of the Console

  • Now you need to register yourself as a user in Let's Chat so that when you login hubot will join the room too. (You need 2 different users so that both you and Hubot can join the same room ;)
  • Login as yourself
  • If you join the room #fabric8_default you should see the hubot bot
  • Ask fabric8 help
  • Type ship it ;)

How to use Chat in Fabric8

Click the Chat item on the navigation bar of the Console. By default you are then prompted to enter your nickname (which defaults to the user name you used to work with the git repositories on the Repositories tab.

Hubot

Hubot uses scripts to add functionality. OOTB Hubot comes with a number of coffee scripts that provide a base set of features. To communicate with fabric8's bot you need to be in the chat room you configured hubot to listen to in the install step above. Once there you can speak to the bot by typing 'fabric8'.

When the hubot container is run it will clone fabric8 hubot scripts and places all coffee scripts in a location that is used by hubot to automatically load when it starts. This can be configured when applying the hubot-letschat appp by setting the $LETSCHAT_HUBOT_SCRIPTS env var.

To see what's available, in your chat client type.. 

    > fabric8 help

Lets Chat with hubot screenshot