BenTen

CUI Chatbot framework (Has out of the box slack-bot support for Jira and Jenkins)

BenTen is a CUI Chatbot framework that provides all the integrations that are necessary for building useful conversational chatbots in a few minutes. It has integrations with NLP engines like Dialogflow, Messaging platforms like Slack, project management tools like Jira and Continuous Integration Tools like Jenkins. It also has support to render messages in various formats like Slack, html (html to image conversion), csv etc...

Benten makes it easy for anybody to build their own personal assistants to take care of mundane tasks.

The frame work lets you concentrate on the core functionality you want to build (for example building a conversational chatbot to monitor application health and show it in slack on demand) rather than worry about integrations with slack, NLP engines or applications like Jira, Jenkins and the orchestration between these systems.

Story behind the name BenTen

In case you were wondering why the name BenTen! You can find an answer here Why the name Benten ?

Features

Jira Feature	Command
Create new JIRA Story/Bug/Sub-Task	create jira story , create jira bug, create jira subtask, create jira story Experience benten jira integration project BENTEN
Show details of a JIRA issue	details of issue, details of issue BENTEN-1
Assign issue	assign issue BENTEN-1 to @divakarungatla
Search issues assigned to me or created by me	my issues, my tickets
Comment on an issue	comment on issue, comment on issue BENTEN-1 this is an example comment
Log work for an issue/story	log 3h 4m against issue BENTEN-1 this is a comment for logging work
Show subtasks of a story	subtasks of story AAA-1234
Transition issue	move BENTEN-1 to inprogress
Cycle time for a sprint	cycle time of board Benten over last 2 sprints
Velocity of a team based on a sprint	velocity of board Benten over last 2 sprints

Note: BenTen uses a headless user which you are going to specify in the benten properties file in the following sections to perform the jira operations. So some features like assign move will need the headless user to be added as admin to you projects. Here is how you do it Add user as admin in Jira.

Jenkins Feature	Command
Search for Jenkins job	search for jenkins job, search for jenkins job with prefix Purchase
Details of Jenkins job	details of jenkins job, details of jenkins job Purchase-Service-Release
Build Jenkins job	build jenkins job Purchase-Service-Release

Try it out!

Before moving forward just experience the awesomeness of BenTen for yourself! Just follow the below link to sign up.

Join Benten Slack

After signing up click on the below link which opens up the benten bot in slack. Type help and that should guide you. My recommendation is to try Create Jira Story to see the conversational power and then my issues

Open BenTen Bot

Note: The above bot runs against jira and jenkins mocks that are written using Karate Test Doubles.

Let's set up BenTen

Now that you have experienced the bot, let us set up BenTen with your own slack bot and run against your Jira and Jenkins.

If you are behind a corporate proxy, or especially if your local Maven installation has been configured to point to a repository within your local network, the command below may not work. One workaround is to temporarily disable or rename your Maven settings.xml file, and try again.

Setting up BenTen from binaries (recommended if you want just use existing capabilites and add custom features only specific to your organization)

There is a maven archetype(benten-archetype) that I created that can be used to set up a skeleton project super quick. Run the below command in your termimal.

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=com.intuit.benten -DarchetypeArtifactId=benten-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=0.1.5 -DgroupId=com.mycompany -DartifactId=benten-starter
cd benten-starter
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Setting up BenTen from sources (recommended if you want to contribute/add new features or integrations to BenTen )

To set up BenTen from sources follow the below steps

git clone https://github.com/intuit/benten
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

To use BenTen in your existing spring project include the below dependencies in your projects pom.xml and refer to Setting up to initialize BenTen.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intuit.benten</groupId>
    <artifactId>benten-core</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.5</version>
</dependency>

Include Jira and Jenkins bolts

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intuit.benten</groupId>
    <artifactId>benten-jira-bolt</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.5</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intuit.benten</groupId>
    <artifactId>benten-jenkins-bolt</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.5</version>
</dependency>

Create a slack team and slackbot(You can skip this section if you already have a slack bot API token)

Follow the below steps to create a slack team and then a slack bot. You can skip this step if you already have a team and are the admin.

Creating Slack team

1. Open https://slack.com/
2. Provide your email ID. Select Create New workspace.
3. Check your email and enter the code to verify your email.
4. Provide your name and set a password
5. Add some details to your team in the next page
6. Provide a company name
7. Team URL should be unique - Also remember this URL - this is what is used to login to your slack instance
8. Agree with the terms
9. Skip the invite step
10. You are up and running with your own instance of Slack.

Now that team is created, let us create a slack bot

Creating Slack bot

1. Open your {team-URL}/apps (the one you created above). Ex: https://test-visual.slack.com/apps
2. Search for bot in the search bar and select bots
3. In the bots landing page click on Add configuration
4. Provide a bot name. Ex: divakar-bot and click on Add Bot integration
5. In the Setup instruction page: Copy and store the API Token. Ex: xoxb-22672546-n1X9APk3D0tfksr81NJj6VAM
6. Save the integration

Create your own Dialog Flow Agent

You might have noticed the conversation interface of BenTen. Benten uses Dialog Flow to build the conversations. You can read more about Dialog flow at https://dialogflow.com/docs/getting-started/basics.

Let us set up your own dialog flow agent. Download the agent zip file from here benten-agent

Follow the instructions in this page Create-BenTen-Agent-in-Dialog-flow.

At the end of it you should have your own dialog flow token.

Now open benten.properties

cd benten-starter
vi src/main/resources/benten.properties

In line #10 change the value of benten.ai.token with your token from above

Start BenTen

cd benten-starter
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
vi src/main/resources/benten.properties

In line #11 replace <slackbot token> with your bot token from bot creation step above Creating Slack bot

mvn spring-boot:run

Now if you see your bot in Slack it should be active! Type hi to see it working. Type help jira or create jira story and you can see responses.

Point BenTen to your own Jira instance

Remember, at this point benten is still running against the karate mocks that come as part of the BenTen code/artifacts. Now let us point it to you Jira instance. Follow the below steps

cd benten-starter
vi src/main/resources/benten.properties

In line #16 change benten.jira.baseurl url to point to your own jira instance instead of the localhost. Also change benten.jira.username and benten.jira.password accordingly. BenTen uses these credentials to connect to Jira. Save the changes.

cd benten-starter
vi src/main/resources/benten.properties

Restart your application

mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
mvn spring-boot:run

Now try the jira commands from your slack-bot and it should work against your Jira!

If you need to use a proxy when you are on a corporate network update below proxy settings accordingly and BenTen will honor the proxy settings

#benten.proxy.port=<proxy-port>
#benten.proxy.host=<proxy-host>
#benten.proxy.protocol=http

Point BenTen to your own Jenkins instance

Similar to Jira make changes for Jenkins as well in benten.properties.

cd benten-starter
vi src/main/resources/benten.properties

In line #18 change benten.jenkins.baseurl url to point to your own jenkins instance instead of the localhost. Also change benten.jenkins.username and benten.jenkins.password accordingly. BenTen uses these credentials to connect to Jira. Save the changes.

Restart your application

mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
mvn spring-boot:run

Type jenkins in your bot and try any of the operations to see them work against your jenkins.

Let's get to Action! (Adding a new ActionHandler)

Let us build a feature in BenTen now. Each feature is called an action in BenTen. Remember! the beauty of BenTen is that you need to concentrate only on the core logic. Let us see how.

We will build an action which will ping a service for n number of times and display the results in the slack-bot after every time it pings the application.

First let us build the conversation. Open your agent that you created in this section. Follow this wiki Creating BenTen Example Conversation in Dialogflow

Create a new package com.example in benten-starter.

cd benten-starter
mkdir com/example

Download BentenExampleAction.java and copy it to the com.example package. The contents of the file are explained below!

Restart your application.

mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
mvn spring-boot:run

Open your slack bot. Type ping benten for 5 times and you should be able to see the below output

If you reached this point it might have stuck you that what you can build using BenTen is only limited by your thoughts! Get creative!