Overview

csp-bot is a framework for building chat applications.

It is is composed of two major components:

• Engine: csp and csp-gateway, a streaming, complex event processor core and corresponding application framework
• Configuration: ccflow, a Pydantic/Hydra based extensible, composeable dependency injection and configuration framework

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Running the bot
• Available Commands
• Writing commands
• Backend Feature Matrix
• Response Formatting

Running the bot

Let's start with a simple Slack bot. Before we can run the csp-bot framework, we need to setup a bot on Slack. We can follow the documentation on csp-adapter-slack using bot name "CSP Bot".

At the end of this setup, we should have two tokens: an "app token" and a "bot token". Put these in files .slack_app_token and .slack_bot_token, respectively.

Warning

Be sure to avoid committing any tokens for any backends in public repos.

Now we can run our bot. csp-bot uses ccflow and hydra for configuration, so this syntax might look a little different from CLIs you are used to. See Configuration for more information.

csp-bot-start +gateway=slack +bot_name="CSP Bot" +app_token=.slack_app_token +bot_token=.slack_bot_token

Now you can message your bot, and by default it should reply with a help menu of all available commands:

Available Commands

One of the main goals of csp-bot is to allow for extremely easy extension. The framework comes with a small number of example commands, but makes it easy to extend. Because backend chat platforms use their own custom command registration and syntax, we adopt an IRC-like /-initiated command syntax. On most platforms, this means to interact with the bot means to tag the bot and provide a command after:

@CSP Bot /help

Name	Command	Description
Help	/help	Displays a list of all commands and their help text
Echo	/echo	Echos text
Schedule	/schedule	Schedules a command to be run repeatedly, as an example of command scheduling

Commands can have their own extra arguments, and most commands can be redirected to another channel by appending /channel <channel name>. Community supported commands can be found at csp-community/csp-bot-commands

Writing commands

Commands have a simple Python structure. Here is an example command that replies "hello" to the initiating user.

from typing import Type
from csp_bot.structs import BotCommand, Message
from csp_bot.commands import ReplyToOtherCommand, BaseCommandModel, BaseCommand, mention_user


class HelloCommand(ReplyToOtherCommand):
    def command(self) -> str:
        return "hello"

    def name(self) -> str:
        return "Hello"

    def help(self) -> str:
        return "Say hello to the tagged users. Syntax: /hello [user tags]"

    def execute(self, command: BotCommand) -> Message:
        author = mention_user(command.source.id, command.backend)
        target = [mention_user(user.id, command.backend) for user in command.targets]
        message = f"{author} says hello to {' '.join(target)}!"
        return Message(
            msg=message,
            channel=command.channel,
            backend=command.backend,
        )


class HelloCommandModel(BaseCommandModel):
    command: Type[BaseCommand] = HelloCommand

To select commands, including custom commands, follow the documentation in Configuration. For example, with a Slack bot and the above command in hello.py:

my_bot_config/slack_with_hello.yaml

# @package _global_
defaults:
  - /gateway: slack
  - _self_

bot_name: CSP Bot
app_token: .slack_app_token
bot_token: .slack_bot_token

gateway:
  _target_: csp_bot.Gateway
  modules:
    - /modules/bot
  commands:
    # Selecting a builtin command
    - /commands/help
    # Adding a custom command/s
    - _target_: hello.HelloCommandModel

And run with:

csp-bot-start --config-dir=my_bot_config +bot=slack_with_hello

Backend Feature Matrix

Backend	Repo	Official / Community Supported	Public Room	Private Room	User-iniated IM	Non user-initiated IM	Threads	Reactions	Attachments
Slack	point72/csp-adapter-slack	Official	X	X	X		X	X
Symphony	point72/csp-adapter-symphony	Official	X	X	X
Discord	csp-community/csp-adapter-discord	Community	X	X	X		X	X

Response Formatting

Response formatting varies wildly between backends, and it can be quite difficult to produce nicely-formatted results. We are working on a convenience layer to make this easier.

Backend	Format	Tables	Images
Slack	Minimal Markdown	No	Yes
Symphony	Custom HTML	Yes	Yes
Discord	Minimal Markdown	No	Yes