binwiederhier / replbot

REPLbot is a bot for Slack and Discord that allows you to control a REPL or shell from a chat. It comes with a few REPLs (Go 🥳, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, Kotlin, C++ and Ubuntu/Bash), but you can easily make or bring your own.

I thought it might be a fun way to collaboratively dabble with a REPL in a team. Yes, I could have gone for a terminal in a browser, but there's nothing like having it right there in Slack. Mainly I did it because it was fun though. 😄

I use tmux and the tmux capture-pane command to run most of the show. It's simple, but effective. In the first iteration I tried using a pseudo terminal (pty) directly, but with all the escape sequences and commands, it was getting kinda tiresome, and I was spending time with stuff that I didn't want to spend time with (though I learned a lot!). And tmux does its job so well.

The actual REPLs are just simple scripts (see script.d folder), so they could be anything you like. I highly recommend using Docker to provide somewhat of an isolation, though you'll probably still need to trust the people using the bot if you give them an entire REPL.

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