1. Running Frisky Locally
2. Writing a Plugin
   1. An example plugin
3. Troubleshooting

Before you get started, make sure you have python 3.8 installed. Frisky is a modern cat bot with modern needs!

Frisky uses pipenv to manage its Python environment. This is just a standard pip package that can be installed with pip install pipenv, the python runtime you install it to does not matter. From the project directory, you can run pipenv install to get your environment set up, and then pipenv run python manage.py runserver

Because Frisky is event driven, you will need to emulate events coming from Slack in order to test your featured end-to-end. However, a test case class is provided to more easily test simple plugins.

When running locally, Frisky uses a sqlite database by default. If you wish to use a Postgres database, you will need to install the psycopg2 bindings.

1. Ingest

   1. Slack Events come in via /slack/events/
   2. API Requests come in via /api/response/
   3. Console Events come in via friskcli

2. Processing

3. Wrapped Frisky instance

4. Response

5. Slack Events API hits /slack/events:

   1. The events view returns a 200 response, and then passes the payload to slack.tasks.process_slack_event
   2. The payload is parsed by slack.tasks.parse_event_properties

To create a plugin, add a python file underneath the plugins/ directory. Inside this file, import and extend the base frisky plugin frisky.plugins.FriskyPlugin. This class contains the base functionality you'll need for a new plugin.

To implement your plugin, implement any of the following properties and methods:

• reactions: List[str] - a list of emoji reactions you want to handle
• commands: List[str] - a list of commands you want to handle
• help: str - helpful information about how to use your plugin in slack
• command_aliases: Dict[str, str] - a dictionary in order to alias commands to others (see learn.py for an example)
• def command_{command_name}(self, message) - for each command you want to handle in your plugin. The message argument is a MessageEvent from the frisky.events package and should contain basic information (slack channel, raw command text sent, user name of sender, etc ...)
• def reaction_{emoji}(self, reaction) - for each reaction you want to handle in your plugin. The message argument is a ReactionEvent from the frisky.events package and should contain basic information (emoji string, username of the user who received the emoji) as well as a MessageEvent instance.

Note that all of these properties are optional, however you must at least implement one and it's corresponding handler function to do implement any functionality.

This example is included in the source as ping.py

from frisky.plugin import FriskyPlugin


class PingPlugin(FriskyPlugin):
    
    commands = ['ping']

    def command_ping(self, message):
        return 'pong'

The base class FriskyTestCase has one method, send_message which takes in a string and handles it as if it was a message sent in channel.

When running pipenv install you may encounter an error like:

[pipenv.exceptions.InstallError]: ['Collecting psycopg2==2.8.4', '  Using cached psycopg2-2.8.4.tar.gz (377 kB)']
[pipenv.exceptions.InstallError]: ['ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:', ... more setuptools gibberish ... ]
...
ERROR: ERROR: Package installation failed...

You can safely ignore this error. The root cause is a transitive dependency of django-heroku however you will generally use sqlite when testing Frisky locally. If you would like to remove these errors you can install the postgres development header package appropriate for you distribution (libpq-dev on Ubuntu, postgresql-devel on CentOS).