brobbot/README.md

A simple helpful robot for your Company

# Brobbot

Brobbot is a chat bot, modeled after GitHub's Campfire bot, hubot. He's pretty
cool. He's extendable with scripts, and can work on [many different chat services](docs/adapters.md).

This repository provides a library that's distributed by `npm` that you
use for building your own bots.  See the [docs/README.md](docs/README.md)
for details on getting up and running with your very own robot friend.

## Forked from Hubot

Brobbot was forked from Hubot. The main motivation being better support for scripts with persistent storage.

### Key differences

#### Loadable brain modules

Brobbot's brain can be a simple Javascript object held in-memory (the deafult `dumb` brain), but you can also load a different brain module to enable a large, fast, persistent brain.
Brobbot's brain operations return promises to make your async code nice and clean.
Each module gets its own keyspace within the brain, so modules don't have to worry about clobbering each others' data.
Brain modules can also provide a `ready` promise in order to signal that the brain is connected/authenticated/whatever it needs to do before it's ready.
Check out [the brain docs](docs/brains.md) for more info.

To load a brain module, use the `-b` switch when running `./index.sh` in your [brobbot-instance](https://npmjs.org/package/brobbot-instance). e.g.

```bash
./index.sh -b redis
```

#### Scripts are npm packages

Brobbot expects script packages to be loadable via `require()`, and to export a function. This is unlike Hubot, which dictates a particular directory structure, and expects to be able to access your script files directly via `fs`.

#### Message queues

Brobbot maintains a message queue for each message handler, which means your handler can opt to process one message at a time with no concurrency.

#### Improved listener regex matching

Brobbot removes its name from the beginning of messages addressed to it before testing regexen against the message. This means that you can safely use anchors (`^`) at the beginning of your `respond` regex, which helps reduce false-positives.