KnowHows is a Slack application that tracks your GitHub repositories and allows users to search for other developers who have knowledge about certain parts of code, such as an API or software concept.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Community
• .NET Core 2.0
• srcML
• Apache Solr

Configuration

1. Navigate to Website.
2. Create GitHub and Slack apps to generate the necessary OAuth tokens for each.
3. Copy appsettings.example.json as appsettings.json.
4. Update all the fields in the AppSettings section. The callback URLs for GitHub and Slack will be {WEBSITE_BASE_URL}/api/github/authenticate and {WEBSITE_BASE_URL}/api/slack/authenticate respectively.
5. Setup Solr according to Apache's directions using the schema.xml and solrconfig.xml provided in the docs.
6. Naming conventions for your created core MUST match that in appsettings.json. This project communicates through an authenticated user. Setting this up is left to the installer, for simple open connections configure the connection in SolrManager.cs to be just your connection string.
7. Make sure your Slack app has a slash command configured that makes requests to {WEBSITE_BASE_URL}/api/slack/processmessage.

Building

Building With Visual Studio

1. Open KnowHows.sln with Visual Studio and click Build.

Building From Command Line

1. Navigate to Website.
2. Run dotnet build. Alternatively, you can run dotnet publish to prepare the website for deployment.

Running

1. Before running the website, ensure that appsettings.json is present in the directory that you'll be running the website from and that srcml is available on your PATH.
2. From the command line, run dotnet run in order to start the website.

Usage

From a Slack channel with KnowHows installed, the app can be invoked with the slash command /knowhows. When you invoke the command for the first time, the app will prompt for access to your GitHub account. The available commands are:

• /knowhows to [query] - Performs a natural language search on a concept, such as write to a file. This produces a ranked list of tracked users indicating files that they have changed.
• /knowhows search [query] - Performs a literal search on a code term, such as an API name like FileWriter. This produces a ranked list of tracked users indicating files that they have changed.
• /knowhows track [repository_name | *] - Tracks and indexes one or all (*) of your repositories. When no repository is specified, a list of your untracked repositories is returned.
• /knowhows untrack [repository_name | *] - Untracks and unindexes one or all (*) of your repositories. When no repository is specified, a list of your currently tracked repositories is returned.
• /knowhows help - Prints a brief description of each of these commands.

Credits

• Alex Aplin (AlexAplin) - Project Lead
• Robbie Uvanni (seefo) - Core
• Ben Leach (broem) - Core
• Kostadin Damevski (damevski) - Project Advisor

License

MIT