FNALBeamBot

FNALBeamBot is a bot that allows to display Channel 13 beam notifications from the Fermilab Accelerator Complex in a Slack channel. The bot monitors Channel 13 for updates with a tunable frequency, and reports any new messages to the specified channel.

Please note that access to the Channel 13 text notifications is available only within the Fermilab network.

Running the bot

The bot is run under a user cronjob every few minutes. Two bash scripts are provided to start (startBeamBot.sh) and stop (stopBeamBot.sh) the bot. The former installs a new line in the user crontab to execute the bot every few minutes. The latter removes the installed line thus stopping the execution of the bot.

The cronjob runs the runFNALBeamBot.sh script. This script automatically creates a Python virtual environment with requirements.txt. No other action is needed by the user apart from tuning the configuration.

Configuration

The primary bot configuration can be changed in scripts/config.py:

# Connection to Channel13
url = 'https://www-bd.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/notify_mes.pl?ch13=text'

# Connection to Slack workspace
slack_token = 'xoxb-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx'
slack_channel = '#fnal-beam-news'
message_template = 'botMessage.json'

# DB file 
db_file = 'notices.db'

# Logging
log_directory = './'
log_level = 'INFO'

Cronjob

The interval at which the cronjob runs is set in startBeamBot.sh. The default is every 5 minutes:

# This script is meant to setup the cronjob that runs the bot
# Choose the interval in minutes (e.g. every 5 minutes)

INTERVAL=5

The cronjob script runFNALBeamBot.sh also needs to point to the main bot directory (top level of this repository). In addition, a path for its logfile needs to be provided. This logfile is useful to debug issues with the cronjob not running.

# This script is meant to be run by a cronjob
# set your bot/log directory or the cronjob won't find the files!

BOTDIR="/path/to/main/dir/FNALBeamBot"
LOGFILE="/path/to/cronjob/log/attempt_bot_${host}_${timestamp}.log"

Slack message

Similarly, the json payload for the Slack message can be customized in botMessage.json. The two keywords %%date%% and %%message%% are replaced by the bot with the actual contents of the notification.

{
  "blocks": [
		{
			"type": "divider"
		},
		{       "type": "section",
                        "text": 
			{
				"type": "mrkdwn",
				"text": ":fermilab: *Channel 13 Notification* on *%%date%%*\n>%%message%%\n>_For more information, check <https://www-bd.fnal.gov/Elog|AD Elog>_."
			}
		},
        	{	"type": "divider"
		}
	    ]
}