Hubot Rate Limiter

What is this?

Sometimes, Hubot can get a little annoying.

Let's say you have a script that makes Hubot say 'hammertime' every time somebody uses the word 'stop':

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.hear /stop/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send 'Hammertime.'

When this occasionally happens, it's kind of funny. But if you're having a conversation where you trigger it in almost every message, it can be a pain:

Hammertime.

With Hubot Rate Limiter, you can add a rate limit to Hubot commands, so that once they're triggered, they won't be triggered again until a certain period has elapsed.

How do I use it?

You don't call it directly, instead, just include the script and then emit an event with a callback.

robot.emit 'rate-limit', key, limitTimeMilliseconds, callback

key is a key you specify for the command, which is used to store it in the Redis brain (which keeps track of which commands are currently rate limited)
limitTimeMilliseconds is how long you'd like to wait before the command can be triggered again. To use the default timeout of 5 minutes, use 0 for this argument.
callback is the code you want to execute if the command isn't currently rate limited.

Here's an example, using the earlier Hubot script:

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.hear /stop/i, (msg) ->
    robot.emit 'rate-limit', 'hammertime', 0, () ->
      msg.send 'Hammertime.'

So, when Hubot responds to this, the callback is only executed if the command is not currently rate limited.

Installation via NPM

Run the following command to install this module as a Hubot dependency

npm install hubot-rate-limiter --save

Confirm that hubot-standup-alarm appears as a dependency in your Hubot package.json file.

"dependencies": {
  "hubot":              "2.x",
  "hubot-scripts":      "2.x",
  "hubot-rate-limiter": "*"
}

To enable the script, add the hubot-standup-alarm entry to the external-scripts.json file (you may need to create this file).

  ["hubot-rate-limiter"]

Contributing

Feel free! Send a pull request :)