go-helpdesk

A library for building helpdesk bots in Go

go-helpdesk is a library and standalone binary designed to be run as a server to respond to Slack slash commands, although it should be possible to use any messaging platform with little effort. Once a user has engaged with the app, you can then configure it to raise JIRA tickets, call someone out on PagerDuty or whatever. The library consists of a server which responds to webhooks from messaging platforms and some common handlers and a wrapper library for Slack and JIRA. It is a simple aid to take some of the sting out of first-line support and incident management using ChatOps.

It is possible to use the basic bundled functionality by simply deploying the bundled implementation or you can import it as a library and write your own.

Development

Dependencies

We have chosen to commit the vendor tree as it gives us repeatable builds and control over our dependencies. Please run dep ensure to update the vendor tree. This is not done by CI.

Automated Testing

We use Mockery for test mocks. Use go generate to regenerate test doubles after you have go getted the mockery package. If you need to add new interfaces to be mocked, add new generate comments to the top of main.go.

Any commit without appropriate test coverage will be rejected.

CLI Usage

Flags

  -a, --app-token string        Slack API token for your slash command (required)
  -b, --bot-token string        Slack API token for bot integration (required)
  -s, --signing-secret string   Slack API signing secret for request verification (required)
  -l, --listen-address string   Address to listen for Slack callbacks on (default ":4390")

Environment Variables

You can set flags from environment variables instead. You simply take the log form of the flag and prefix it with HELP_, replacing any hyphens with underscores.

Example: HELP_APP_TOKEN will set the app-token flag

Nb. Flags take precedence over environment variables.

Slack Tokens

go-helpdesk requires three different tokens to connect to Slack. An app token is provided when creating a new slash command and a bot token is required to send messages etc. A signing secret for your app is also required, to enable us to ensure that requests are legitimate.(TODO: expand this)

Deployment

An example LinuxKit configuration is included which is capable of creating a minimal OS image and running it, for example, on AWS.

You will want to edit/make a copy of this file for your own use and add you Slack tokens and secret. Remember not to commit these!

Refer to the LinuxKit documentation for full usage. However, you can run this locally with just a few commands.

go get -u github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/src/cmd/linuxkit
linuxkit build linuxkit-example.yml

# Using QEMU
linuxkit run qemu linuxkit-example
# HyperKit (OSX)
linuxkit run hyperkit linuxkit-example

Library Usage

Check the example main.go (TODO: write a proper guide once API is stable)