bort is a nice bot.

dockerized. will spin up Slack and/or Discord clients if the respective environment variables are present. possible env vars are:

• DISCORD_TOKEN: a Discord API token
• USE_CLI: if 'true', will start up an interface that reads from stdin and prints to stdout instead of connecting to any servers.
• BOT_NAME: the bot name (default: 'bort')
• DATA_DIR: the directory to store persistent data (default: 'persist')
• HOSTNAME: hostname for the bot's server component (defaults to 'localhost' in a dev environment, required in production)
• PORT: port number for the bot's server component (defaults to 8080 in a dev environment, required in production)
• OPEN_WEATHER_MAP_KEY: an api key for the OpenWeatherMap api, if you'd like bort to be able to tell you the weather.

(Slack support is removed as of 4.0.0 -- there were some breaking changes in the client API and it didn't seem like bort was running on any Slack teams. if there's interest it can be re-added.)

each service that bort connects to gets its own isolated data store. stores are leveldb databases (via the level package) that are persisted to the directory provided as the DATA_DIR.

the "server component" mentioned above currently serves two purposes:

• it serves static files, like the bot's profile image (which must be hosted for services like Slack and Discord) and generated comics.
• it's a ping server that you can use in combination with a service like uptimerobot.com to verify if the bot is still running. (...and it's useful in the free tier of certain SaaSes to prevent the bot from going to sleep.)

eventually the plan is to have a full web-based management interface (that optionally authenticates through Discord account for authorized members of your server) but that's a bit ambitious for a hobby project designed for sharing funny gifs and making bad rhymes.

npm start will start the bot in production mode. Use npm run dev if you want to run a local bot that will connect to services but restart on any change, or npm run dev-cli to spin up an offline command-line interface for testing that will restart on any change.

bort is written in typescript, and the dockerfile will compile to js as part of its setup.