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Recurse Center - Status Bot

This is the repository for Status Bot, a helpful Zulip bot who update both your Virtual RC and Zulip statuses during your batch.

This bot is written using the Rust programming language and was primarily an effort to restore status-ing order to the world as well as to learn Rust.

A large effort was made to make the source code easy to read, well documented, tested, and maintainable.

Installing

Install Rust via rustup

# Latest version of rust 
rustup update 

# Download and build this crate and its dependencies defined in Cargo.toml
cargo build

Running Locally

RUST_LOG=trace cargo run

# For active local development, install cargo-watch
cargo install cargo-watch
RUST_LOG=trace cargo watch -c -w src -x run

Deploying w/ Docker & fly.io

TODO

Virtual RC API

Virtual RC has an API for things like pet bots, maze bots, and all sorts of other things. We will be using it to update the status.

To authenticate with Virtual RC, we need to first [create an app] at [example.rctogether.com/apps] where we create:

  1. An app_id
  2. An app_secret

All API requests are made using HTTP basic auth with username: app_id and password: app_secret. Alternatively we can pass these as URL parameters.

In Virtual RC, each user may optionally have created a desk for themselves. Their desk may optionally contain a status which consists of:

  1. A optional status string
  2. An optional emoji of the current status
  3. An optional expires_at when the status should expire

Virtual RC bots (which use the API) may update their desk's status by using PATCH api/desks/:id. The bot may only update a desk which belongs to the user or is unclaimed.

Rust HTTP and JSON

Here are some common and possible choices for crates to allow HTTP request/response and JSON communication with the Zulip API.

  • hyper is a no-frills HTTP networking library written in Rust. It setup a basic HTTP server and handle requests
  • axum is a more fully featured async HTTP library for Rust and the Tokio ecosystem. It provides many nice abstractions and traits over Request/Response using the tower::Service trait. While this is an ergonomic choice, it may include to much "magic" for those wishing to learn from the beginning.
  • serde is an amazing Rust library allowing for generic serialization and deserialization of any Rust data type with helpful and easy to use macros and annotations. This will certainly be a crate used in this project.

Extracting Zulip Emoji Names

Status Bot needs to know which emoji aliases map to unicode characters for emojis. For example: :apple: in Zulip maps to 🍎. However the official unicode alias for 🍎 is :red_apple:.

Basically Zulip has done some realiasing and we have to invert the aliases so we know unicode characters they are supposed to map to.

I forked the zulip repository and wrote a Python script to read through their emoji aliases and output a JSON file which

The forked branch can be found here