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](https://zulip.com/) bot.
[](https://circleci.com/gh/sipb/chiron)
[](https://gitlab.com/adehnert/chiron/commits/master)
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`](https://github.com/ebroder/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`](http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/kstart/) 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 <adehnert> 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](https://github.com/sipb/chiron/issues/), 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.
