good-bot-cli

Good-bot's command line interface for Docker containers.

Installation

Binary download

Coming soon.

Go install

Note: You will need to have the Go Toolchain installed to use this method.

Note: With this installation method, good-bot-cli will be installed in your $GOPATH. If your $GOPATH has not been added to your PATH, the executable won’t be available from everywhere on your machine.

Quick install

go install github.com/TrickyTroll/good-bot-cli

Go toolchain

To install good-bot-cli in your GOPATH, you should run the following command.

go install github.com/TrickyTroll/good-bot-cli

Cloning the repo

You can install good-bot-cli by cloning this repository.

git clone https://github.com/TrickyTroll/good-bot-cli.git

You can then:

1. Navigate to the root directory of the repository you just cloned.
2. Install the app with the Go toolchain.

   go install .

Downloading the repository

You can also download the repository. This will download a zip archive. You should then be able to:

1. Unzip the archive.
2. Navigate to the root of the unzipped archive.
3. Install the app with the Go toolchain.

   go install .

Usage

TLDR

Good Bot has two main commands, setup and record. You always need to run setup before the record command if you are working on a new project.

Using setup

First, navigate to the directory where your video script is saved. Then, to use setup:

On a Unix-like system

good-bot-cli setup [script-name.yaml]

This should prompt you for a project name. Good Bot will then create a new directory that contains everything required by the record command.

Using record

Make sure that you are in the same directory as the directory that you created with the setup command. Then, you should be able to record your project using the following instructions.

On a Unix-like system

good-bot-cli record [project-name]

This should start recording right away. Please note that the [project-name] is the name of the directory created with setup, not the name of your script.

Manual

General instructions on how to use good-bot-cli. Some more tourough documentation is coming soon.

Available commands

configure

configure allows you to interactively set up the variables required by Good Bot to use the TTS engine and to use passwords. After entering the command, an interactive prompt will ask you to provide the path towards your text to speech key and password file.

If Good Bot had already been configured, this command will overwrite the previous parameters.

When using another Good Bot command, the configure command will run automatically if no configuration file is found.

echoConfig

The echoConfig simply outputs the configuration file. Can be used to know which credential and password files will be used.

record

The record command uses a project directory previously created by the setup command to record a video. This command takes care of typing the command while recording and sending the text files to Google Text to Speech to generate audio. When executed with no flags, this command also merges the videos produced for each scene in a final video.

There are two additional options when using the record command:

• --no-render: Only produces Asciinema recordings and mp3 narration. Does not convert the recordings to the gif format and does not create any mp4 file.

• --gifs-only: Only convert the Asciinema recordings to the gif format. The final product will contain the converted gifs, the original asciicasts, and the audio narration. No mp4 file will be created.

render

render uses a project that has been recorded but not rendered yet and renders a video from it. It is essentially the missing part of the record --no-render command. This command converts the asciicasts to the gif format and merges the audio and video files to create mp4 files from your project.

setup

This command uses your script (the YAML instruction file you wrote) to create a directory that contains the information required for the record command. It essentially splits your config file into many smaller files that will be used by Good Bot's modules (the runner, Google TTS, ezvi).

You need to provide the path towards the script as an argument.

For more information on writing scripts, see Writing scripts.

Writing scripts

When writing your script, you should follow certain guidelines to make sure that Good Bot behaves as expected.

First, your script should follow the YAML syntax and preferably be saved with the yaml extension.

The script

Here is what a configuration file could look like:

1:
  - commands:
      - echo 'hello world'
    expect:
      - prompt
    read: Hello, world.

  - commands:
      - ls -a
    expect:
      - prompt
    read: I can run commands.
2:
  - commands:
      - echo 'hello from another scene'
    expect:
      - prompt
    read: Here is a new scene!
3:
  - commands:
      - echo 'I can also be quiet...sometimes'
    expect:
      - prompt

In this example, the script is divided into three different scenes. A scene is a bloc of actions that will be recorded together and share the same shell and variables. Grouping your commands in the same scene also guarantees that they will be running in order. In this example, the scenes 1, 2 and 3 could be recorded in a different order than 1, 2 and then 3.

A scene

1:
  - commands:
      - echo 'hello world'
    expect:
      - prompt
    read: Hello, world.

  - commands:
      - ls -a
    expect:
      - prompt
    read: I can run commands.

This is just the first scene.

Each scene contains actions and optionally text that should be narrated while the action is performed. In this first scene, there are two different action blocs, and each one performs the "commands" type of action. There are currently three different types of action available, but only "commands" is documented here.

The commands action

- commands:
    - echo 'hello world'
  expect:
    - prompt
  read: Hello, world.

Commands allow you to interact with a terminal. It uses Good Bot's runner program to interact with the shell (bash by default). Each command is "typed" to the prompt using runner. The expect statement can be used to expect certain things to be printed on the shell before sending the next command. This can be used to interact with a program just like a human would.

In the next script, the commands action is used to interact with ssh. Using the expect keyword, Good Bot can answer (yes/no) and password prompts.

1:
- commands:
  - echo "I'm in a container."
  - ssh -p 2222 tricky@ssh-test-server
  - "yes"
  - password: SSH_TRICKY
  - echo 'Hello from another container!'
  expect:
  - prompt
  - "(yes/no)"
  - assword
  - prompt
  - prompt
  read: Good bot also lets you use passwords by setting environment variables. In this example, a password is used to connect to a remote machine.

If you are familiar with Don Libes' Expect, Good Bot's implementation is very similar. It uses a Python implementation of expect. For more information on using Good Bot's runner program, go check the repo.

Motivation

Before writing good-bot-cli, Good Bot was only distributed as a Docker image. This allows the program to always start recording in a new environment with nothing installed. You won't need to manually uninstall every program that was installed for your demo each time you want to record a new take.

The main problem with containerized application is that it makes file and environment sharing between the host and the container quite tedious.

When using Google Text to Speech and passwords at the same time, the record command had to look something like this:

docker run -it -v $PWD:/project -v /home/tricky/Documents/credentials:/credentials --env GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/credentials/good-bot-tts.json --env-file /home/tricky/Documents/credentials/good-bot.env gb record project

Two hundred and sixty-six characters for a single command wasn't very reasonable.

good-bot-cli allows a user to interactively configure each path towards files that are required by Good Bot. The CLI also takes care of making the required mounts and starts the container in interactive mode when required. Once the configuration process is completed, good-bot-cli would tun the previous command to this:

good-bot-cli record project