Running Hubot for Visual Studio Online on an Azure Web Site

 

This is the third and last post on this series.

On the first post Using Hubot with Visual Studio Online I showed you, how you could install Hubot on a un*x box (I used an Azure virtual machine) and run commands against a Visual Studio Online account from a campfire chat room, by installing Hubot Scripts for Visual Studio Online

On the second post Using Hubot with Visual Studio Online Team Rooms I showed, how you could connect the same install to a Visual Studio Online Team Room instead of campfire, by using Hubot Adapter for Visual Studio Online

On this post I will explain, what you need to run hubot that is connected to one (or more) Visual Studio Online team room(s) in order to respond to commands; but running on an Azure web site instead of an un*x box.

Since Visual Studio Online uses notification events it is very suited for running on a Azure Web Site with optimized resources.

Running Hubot on an azure web site, has several advantages over running it on a nodejs process in virtual Machine:

• It is cheaper. You can run Hubot on an free Azure web site. It’s hard to beat free.
• You don’t need to buy an SSL certificate (it’s not mandatory, but it is recommended that you use secure communications between visual studio online and your Hubot instance) since azure web sites support SSL out of the box
• Unlike a VM it doesn’t require any administration

Nodejs running in an azure web site is not executed as standalone nodejs process, it is hosted on IIS. This means that IIS manages hubot process lifetime so it can kill/unload it (no worries, it will wake up as soon as it receives an event) as it sees fit. This means that if you are using the “join room feature” Hubot may not be visible on the room, EVEN though he will respond to commands if properly configured.

Before continuing, let introduce n Hubot concept I’ve not mentioned in previous posts. The brain.

Hubot brain, is an abstraction which represents a persistent storage mechanism that Hubot (and it’s scripts) can use to store data and state. The default out of the box mechanism used by Hubot is Redis.

Azure doesn’t has a redis service (it supports redis cache, but we need a persistent mechanism), so we need something to replace it (we could use a VM but that would beat the purpose of using an Azure web site )

We will use Hubot azure scripts which provides an implementation of an Hubot brain, which uses Azure Storage Blob to store it’s data.

Installing hubot azure scripts, is quite simple. You just need to install it using npm install hubot-azure-scripts. Configure the brain in hubot-scripts.json  and then set a few environment variables, so the scripts can connect to your azure blob account.

I will not describe the steps to install and configure an hubot instance connected to Visual Studio Online team rooms, since the procedure is thoroughly described in the installation docs.