system-config/doc/source/irc.rst

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title

IRC Services

IRC Services

The infrastructure team runs a number of IRC bots that are active on OpenStack related channels.

At a Glance

Hosts
Puppet
  • modules/meetbot
  • modules/statusbot
  • modules/gerritbot
  • modules/openstack_project/manifests/eavesdrop.pp
  • modules/openstack_project/manifests/review.pp
Configuration
  • gerritbot/channels.yaml
Projects
Bugs

Channel Requirements

In general, discussion for OpenStack projects is preferred in #openstack-dev, but there are many reasons why a team would like to have their own channel.

Access

Register the channel with ChanServ and give the infrastructure team account founder access to the channel with:

/msg chanserv access #channel add openstackinfra +AFRfiorstv

This is good practice project-wide to make sure we keep channels under control and is a requirement if you want any of the project bots in your channel.

Join #openstack-infra if you have any trouble with any of these commands.

Meetbot

The OpenStack Infrastructure team run a slightly modified Meetbot to log IRC channel activity and meeting minutes. Meetbot is a plugin for Supybot which adds meeting support features to the Supybot IRC bot.

Supybot

In order to run Meetbot you will need to get Supybot. You can find the latest release here. Once you have extracted the release you will want to read the INSTALL and doc/GETTING_STARTED files. Those two files should have enough information to get you going, but there are other goodies in doc/.

Once you have Supybot installed you will need to configure a bot. The supybot-wizard command can get you started with a basic config, or you can have the OpenStack meetbot puppet module do the heavy lifting.

One important config setting is supybot.reply.whenAddressedBy.chars, which sets the prefix character for this bot. This should be set to something other than # as # will conflict with Meetbot (you can leave the setting blank if you don't want a prefix character).

Meetbot

The OpenStack Infrastructure Meetbot fork can be found at https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/meetbot. Manual installation of the Meetbot plugin is straightforward and documented in that repository's README. OpenStack Infrastructure installs and configures Meetbot through Puppet.

Voting

The OpenStack Infrastructure Meetbot fork adds simple voting features. After a meeting has been started a meeting chair can begin a voting block with the #startvote command. The command takes two arguments, a question posed to voters (ending with a ?), and the valid voting options. If the second argument is missing the default options are "Yes" and "No". For example:

#startvote Should we vote now? Yes, No, Maybe

Meeting participants vote using the #vote command. This command takes a single argument, which should be one of the options listed for voting by the #startvote command. For example:

#vote Yes

Note that you can vote multiple times, but only your last vote will count.

One can check the current vote tallies useing the #showvote command, which takes no arguments. This will list the number of votes and voters for each item that has votes.

When the meeting chair(s) are ready to stop the voting process they can issue the #endvote command, which takes no arguments. Doing so will report the voting results and log these results in the meeting minutes.

A somewhat contrived voting example:

foo     | #startvote Should we vote now? Yes, No, Maybe
meetbot | Begin voting on: Should we vote now? Valid vote options are Yes, No, Maybe.
meetbot | Vote using '#vote OPTION'. Only your last vote counts.
foo     | #vote Yes
bar     | #vote Absolutely
meetbot | bar: Absolutely is not a valid option. Valid options are Yes, No, Maybe.
bar     | #vote Yes
bar     | #showvote
meetbot | Yes (2): foo, bar
foo     | #vote No
foo     | #showvote
meetbot | Yes (1): bar
meetbot | No (1): foo
foo     | #endvote
meetbot | Voted on "Should we vote now?" Results are
meetbot | Yes (1): bar
meetbot | No (1): foo

Logging

Meetings are automatically logged and published at http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/

The bot also has the ability to sit in a channel for the sole purpose of logging channel activity, not just meetings. Standard channel logs are sent to http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/

The configuration for specific channel logging can be found in modules/openstack_project/manifests/eavesdrop.pp.

Statusbot

Statusbot is used to distribute urgent information from the Infrastructure team to OpenStack channels. It updates the Infrastructure Status wiki page. It supports the following public message commands when issued by authenticated and whitelisted users from the channels the bot is listening to, including #openstack-infra:

#status log MESSAGE

Log a message to the wiki page.

#status notice MESSAGE

Broadcast a message to all OpenStack channels, and log to the wiki page.

#status alert MESSAGE

Broadcast a message to all OpenStack channels and change their topics, log to the wiki page, and set an alert box on the wiki page (eventually include this alert box on status.openstack.org pages).

#status ok [MESSAGE]

Remove alert box and restore channel topics, optionally announcing and logging an "okay" message.

Gerritbot

Gerritbot watches the Gerrit event stream (using the "stream-events" Gerrit command) and announces events (such as patchset-created, or change-merged) to relevant IRC channels.

Gerritbot's configuration is in gerritbot/channels.yaml

Teams can add their channel and go through the standard code review process to get the bot added to their channel. The configuration is organized by channel, with each project that a channel is interested in listed under the channel.