Earlier than my profession in info expertise, I used to be an educator. I started educating inner-city children in a summer time camp, the place I realized, practiced and taught many helpful classes, together with the significance of getting enjoyable and in holding a optimistic day by day routine. Later, I taught for the federal government and was impressed by way of expertise to save lots of lives (each authorities and civilian). This was a catalyst for main me again to pc expertise (I used to be a programmer and technophile as a baby). Lastly, after incomes a Grasp’s in Training and whereas educating aboard, I realized the right way to make the most of Data and Communications Know-how (ICT) in a day by day routine, in an effort to switch data to college students. Primarily utilizing a few of the very applied sciences which serve to distract them, to show them. And, to supply them the instruments to show themselves.
Every day, incremental presentation of related and difficult info is environment friendly, enjoyable and supplies a basis for studying, communication and confidence which extends past the partitions of classroom and company workplace alike.
Goal
This mission describes the right way to create a Webex bot which posts to a Webex house you have got created. Adaptive Playing cards can be used to design the message the bot will submit. Data of Python is critical in an effort to program the bot, message, and house particulars. GitHub Secrets and techniques, Actions, and Workflows can be utilized to automate precisely what and when the bot posts.
A card much like the above is posted on an everyday schedule to the ‘Phrase of the Day’ Webex room. A random phrase is chosen every time from a whole lot of essentially the most cutting-edge and fascinating phrases related to improvement, coding, networking, cloud computing and the sociology of expertise. The phrase is in inexperienced font. A multi-word/sentence definition is offered beneath that. Under the definition is a button with inexperienced font that’s clickable and can take the person to the supply and/or extra info on the phrase of the day.
Create the Webex Room
Click on on the + signal on the high of Webex and choose ‘Create a Area’. Then identify it and click on ‘Create’. Now the room is created and it is best to see it seem within the rooms column on the left of Webex. Now, we’d like the Room ID of the brand new room. We are able to get it through the use of the Webex for Builders interactive Rooms API name. Ensure you’re logged in and choose to make use of your private entry token. Within the ‘sortBy’ discipline, kind ‘lastactivity’. Click on the ‘Run’ button and a listing of the newest rooms you’ve interacted with ought to be returned.
The room you simply created can be on high. Save the id of the room. Later, we’ll use that as the worth of our ‘teams_room’ variable. It can save you the opposite values someplace as effectively. It’s good observe to maintain notes when creating issues; you by no means know while you’ll want them.
Craft the Template of the Message to Be Posted to Your Webex Room
I favor utilizing Adaptive Playing cards when posting to Webex areas. For those who’re ranging from scratch, you’ll positively want the Buttons and Playing cards Designer discovered on Webex for Builders. Mess around with it utilizing ‘Preview mode’ till it seems to be proper after which copy the code with ‘Copy card payload’. Put it aside someplace.
Subsequent we wish to create a message to submit within the Webex house that can comprise the cardboard we simply created. You’ll be able to take a look at this out with the interactive Create a Message on the Webex for Builders web page beneath the ‘Attempt it’ tab. Don’t neglect to stick you Adaptive Card code you saved into the ‘attachments’ discipline, in addition to the roomID you saved from the earlier API name. Click on ‘Run’ to create the message. Whenever you get it working, click on the ‘Instance’ tab and replica the code. You’ll use this to construct your request.
Constructing the App in Python
Okay, we’ve got our Webex Room and the core of the message, primarily based on the adaptive card. Now, let’s write some Python code that can make the whole lot come collectively and run. I exploit the Visible Studio Code IDE.
Create a digital atmosphere and begin constructing your code within it.
I exploit Python and the requests library to do all of the work for this app. You’ll be able to see that the code is fairly easy -> https://github.com/xanderstevenson/word-of-the-day-bot/blob/major/chatops.py. The principle elements are the adaptive card we created, some if/else statements and a easy requests perform for posting to a Webex room. I import ‘return_word’ perform from a file in the identical listing referred to as ‘phrases’. That is additionally a Python module and principally picks a random time period from a listing to submit with the cardboard to the Webex room every time the chatops.py module is run.
Create a Bot to Put up the Message to the Webex Area
To this point you have got your Webex Room and you’ve got Python code to submit messages to your room. However who will submit the messages. That’s the place the bot is available in.
Go to Webex for Builders / My Apps and ‘Create a New App’ (You’ll should be logged in to do that). Select ‘Create a Bot’. Observe all of the steps and create the bot. You’ll then get a Bot Entry Token. Save this because the TEAMS_ACCESS_TOKEN variable within the ‘~/.bashrc’ file with the road export TEAMS_ACCESS_TOKEN=””. Use the command ‘supply ~/.bashrc’ to load the variable into the atmosphere. You’ll be able to test this labored with the command ‘echo $TEAMS_ACCESS_TOKEN’. In my major module, chatops.py, you’ll see the road ‘access_token = os.environ.get(“TEAMS_ACCESS_TOKEN”). This units it up so the bot is the one doing the posting within the Webex house. Cool, proper?
Working the App out of your Native Console (for debugging)
Now I can run the command ‘python chatops.py’ or ‘python3 chatops.py’ to run the app domestically (for the reason that Python verrsion is 3.8.10). Each time I run this command, a brand new random phrase of the day will seem within the Webex house. I solely use this for testing functions.
(venv) alexstev@ALEXSTEV-M-FCUD wod % python chatops.py your message was efficiently posted to Webex Groups
Working the App on Schedule (Utilizing GitHub Workflows and Actions)
As a way to run the app on a schedule, we use GitHub workflows. As a way to try this, you’ll have to create a GitHub repo named ‘.github’ and creat a listing in it referred to as ‘.github/workflows’. In order that structrure will seem like this: ‘.github/.github/workflows/’.
Subsequent, you wish to create a workflow file within the workflows listing. It should comprise a reputation, a set off, a job, and fundamental steps (together with checkout and run). To be taught extra about what all this implies, try this tutorial: How To Construct Your First GitHub Actions Workflow. I even have a ‘workflow templates’ listing within the ‘.github’ repo that accommodates the workflow as a template, in addition to a properties.json file describing the whole lot.
That is what mine seems to be like –> https://github.com/xanderstevenson/.github/blob/default-branch/.github/workflows/wod-workflow.yml
It’s solely 29 strains of code! Automation all day!
One key element in my workflow is that this line ‘TEAMS_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets and techniques.TEAMS_ACCESS_TOKEN }}’. I retailer that within the repo you’re studying now beneath Settings -> Secrets and techniques -> Actions.
Now we wish to join the Workflow we created with the repo and the code we wish to run. In my word-of-the-day-bot GitHub repo, I click on on the Actions tab and click on on ‘New workflow’ and discover my workflow listed amongst all of the really helpful and prebuilt workflows in a piece titled ‘By Alexander Stevenson’. For those who’ve already completed this, you may return a step to Actions and click on ‘Choose workflow’ to choose the workflow you need.
If the whole lot is setup accurately, the code will run fully and the Webex house will obtain a brand new message. If not, you’ll get an e-mail to the deal with related together with your GitHub account. You too can click on on the ‘Actions’ tab in your code repo and also you’ll see an in depth description of why your code failed.
Phrase Alternative and Sources
For this mission, phrases had been chosen that are related to fashionable and future applied sciences. I additionally intentionally selected phrases which have cross-functional use in community and software program improvement. Moreover, I selected a mixture of phrases which can be of curiosity to a variety of IT professionals, i.e., engineers, managers, human sources personnel, testers, programmers, builders, cybersecurity, and many others..
I used a wide range of sources to search out essentially the most cutting-edge phrases however with out getting too deep or technical. Neither did I select phrases which might be too frequent or easy. Final however not least, I attempted to compile a listing of phrases that can make anybody who makes use of them sound sensible. Effectively, not likely. Really, humor is a typical theme. Making an attempt to onerous to sound sensible often has the other impact.
Sources (not all-inclusive)
Rework Wikipedia Article to MP3 Information
By clicking on the ‘Study Extra’ button on every Phrase of the Day message, customers are taken to a webpage which can present an excellent deeper definition. The overwhelming majority of the time, this can be a Wikipedia article. Personally, I plan on studying the whole article in order that I can actually grok every time period.
A colleague of ours at Cisco, John Capobianco, has developed a package deal referred to as wikitrola, which can rework any Wikipedia web page into an MP3 file.
In case you have neither the time, endurance, nor need to learn the Wikipedia article, simply use wikitrola and you may hearken to it whereas multitasking or enjoyable.
Codebase Updates
I had created an empty init.py file within the root listing out of behavior. Earlier than Python 3.3 this was completed to to make Python deal with the directories as containing packages and facilitate importing between modules. From Python 3.3+ Implicit Namespace Packages are supported which permits the creation of a package deal with out an init.py file. This nonetheless solely applies to empty init.py recordsdata. So empty init.py recordsdata are now not vital and will be omitted.
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