Chiron

Chiron is a chatbot that listens for messages containing ticket numbers, looks up the ticket in an appropriate bugtracker, and responds with the ticket title and URL. Over time, the definition of "bugtracker" has broadened -- it includes actual bugtrackers like Debathena's, but also MIT class numbers and Bible verses.

It supports running as both a zephyrbot (MIT's chat system) and a Zulip bot.

Features

• Supports "tickets" in more than two dozen different "bugtracker" instances --- see bugtrackers.txt for a list
• Generic support for projects using
  • Trac
  • Jira
  • Github Issues
  • Bugzilla
• Responds to both personal and class/stream messages
  • For personal messages, will reply-all when there are multiple recipients

Running

For Zulip support, install using the zulip extra, and then run ./main.py --protocol=zulip, which will use your ~/.zuliprc. Subscriptions are managed through the usual Zulip mechanisms.

For zephyr support, Chiron requires Evan Broder's python-zephyr -- requirements.zephyr.txt may be useful -- and must be run with tickets so that it can sub to incoming zephyrs. You may find k5start helpful for keeping current tickets available.

If you just run it with ./main.py, it will subscribe to zephyr personals only with some default bugtrackers.

Primary production deployment

Alex Dehnert runs the primary Chiron instance for zephyr, and is generally happy to add additional matchers, fetchers, or classes. To request changes, please file an issue (or pull request) on Github, zephyr him, or send mail to chiron@mit.edu.

He also runs instances on some private Zulip realms.

Private deployments

If you want to run your own private production Chiron instance, you can also do that. By default, main.py will only sub to personals. You can pass the --class option one or more times to tell it to sub to specific classes. Additionally, when run with the --default-classes option it will sub to a variety of default classes. Feel free to crib from main.py in setting up your own Chiron instance, or run it subbed only to personals. However, please ensure that if you run a Chiron instance that subs to non-personals, it listens on different classes and/or uses different matchers than the primary instance, so that users don't receive multiple replies to their zephyrs. (Using the --class option and not --default-classes is an easy way to accomplish this.)

Deploying on scripts

The setup used for running the production zephyr instance on scripts.mit.edu is in the deploy directory. It may be a decent reference for deploying your own copy of Chiron or other similar zephyrbots.