Meet Flower, the Flowdock bot

Flowdock is a team collaboration and group chat service, similar to Campfire.

Flowdock is also the group chat service of choice here at the R&D dept. To make it more fun and/or usable, we made this bot.

Flower, the Flowdock bot was written in Ruby, and made to be easy to extend with your own commands.

How do I use it?

1. Sign up for Flowdock if you haven’t already
2. Create a new Flowdock user account for your Flower bot. Give it a nickname, for example “Bot”, or “Steve”.
3. Download the source code from Github
4. Copy and rename config.yml.example to config.yml, and fill it with your settings
5. rake run
6. Mention your Bot in the chat to command it

Writing my own commands

You should write your own commands to make Flower fun and/or useful for your team.

This is easy. Simply create a class like this in lib/commands that inherits Flower::Command:

MyCommand.respond will be invoked when a message prefix matches what you respond_to. Arguments passed are:

• command – The matched command
• message – The entire message
• sender – A hash with sender user id/nick info: {:id => 123, :nick => "Jonas"}
• flower – The Flower instance, that can say or paste something. Both methods can take the option {:mention => sender[:id]} to highlight a message to that user in the chat.

A few commands can be found in our separate command repository at Github: https://github.com/mynewsdesk/Flower-Commands

The really fun and useful commands still remains to be written, but Flower provides us with a nice API.

So what do you think? What commands should be implemented next? Is anyone out there using Flowdock?