An automation framework for repetitive dev tasks

Note This is not actively maintained as I don't need to use it too much at FB.

There were a lot of tasks that I found myself repeating during dev work. I wanted something that was device/editor agnostic and could handle multiline arguments with no hassle.

After playing around with the Telegram API, I hacked together a quick Bot to start this automation. This is the result of a few weeks of tinkering in hopes of making something more extensible.

This bot was originally designed to work with Telegram but I added support for a command line interface when I wanted something that also worked offline as well.

You can see how I use this framework here.

Add the following to your Gemfile and then run bundle install

gem 'pug-bot'

Before you can interact with pug-bot, you need to give it something to do via Actions

An Action is an abstract representation of a task. This could be anything from transforming RGB colors in the form: 66, 134, 244 to 4286f4 or pulling reports from an API to display stock prices.

To define your own action, you need to create a new class which subclasses Pug::Interfaces::Action as follows

# actions/hello_world_action.rb
require 'pug'

class HelloWorldAction < Pug::Interfaces::Action
end

There are a few methods you must override specifically name, requires_input?, and execute.

• name helps to identify your Action
• requires_input? determines if input is required for your Action
• execute is what happens when the Action is ran

# actions/hello_world_action.rb
require 'pug'

class HelloWorldAction < Pug::Interfaces::Action
  def name
    'Hello, World'
  end

  def requires_input?
    true
  end

  def execute(input)
    "Hello, #{input}"
  end
end

Once you've defined your action you just need a way to interact with it. There are two ways to interact with pug-bot: Telegram and Terminal.

To use Telegram we need to first setup a Telegram Bot. Thankfully, Telegram makes this a nice experience. Skip this and the next section if you want to just use Terminal.

Assuming you already have Telegram installed, you'll need to perform the following steps:

1. Start a new conversation with @botfather on Telegram
2. Type /newbot and follow its steps to create a new Bot
3. Grab the token for the HTTP API, this is your Telegram API token
4. Start a new conversation with your newly created Bot
5. Visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>/getUpdates with YOUR_BOT_TOKEN replaced with the token from Step 3.
6. Look for the id field in the chat body, this is your Telegram Chat ID

To setup Telegram, ensure you have an API token and Chat ID. Replace YOUR_TELEGRAM_TOKEN and YOUR_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID with the token and chat_id for your Bot.

require 'pug'
require_relative './actions/hello_world_action'

Pug.configure do |config|
  config.type = Pug::Configuration::TELEGRAM
  config.token = 'YOUR_TELEGRAM_TOKEN'
  config.chat_id = 'YOUR_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID'
  config.actions = [HelloWorldAction.new]
end

Pug::Bot.run

Note: If you want to interact with Telegram without a script, you'll need to deploy to a server such as Heroku.

To setup Terminal, you just need to specify the type as Terminal

require 'pug'
require_relative './actions/hello_world_action'

Pug.configure do |config|
  config.type = Pug::Configuration::TERMINAL
  config.actions = [HelloWorldAction.new]
end

Pug::Bot.run

Every Action that pug-bot handles is enumerated. To call your command, you just need to type in the number that it corresponds to. For the HelloWorldAction, that would be 0 as shown below:

Hints can be provided via entering: help or list.

This flowchart outlines how an Action gets handled by pug-bot

Documentation can be generated via rake document. You can view the resulting documentation by loading the html files from the newly generated doc/ folder in a browser.