mensabot

A bot that reminds you of your food in your mensa

mensabot sends you a daily reminder of the current menu in your canteen (German: mensa). Additionally, you can use commands to request the listing directly.

Features

  • Schedule daily posts about the food in your canteen
  • Request a summary of the food in your mensa for the current date
  • Change display name per room
  • Simple rights management (only configured admins can interact with the bot)

Functions

Supported APIs

This bot aims to support multiple canteen APIs. For details about the implementation, take a look at Development.

Currently, the bot supports the following mensa:

Setup

  1. Get a matrix account for the bot (e.g., on your own homeserver or on matrix.org)
  2. Prepare configuration:
    • Copy config-sample.json to config.json
    • Enter baseUrl to the matrix server and username / password for the bot user
    • Add yourself to the admins (and delete my account from the list :))
  3. Either run the bot via jar or run it via the provided docker.
    • If you run it locally, you can use the environment variable CONFIG_PATH to point at your config.json (defaults to ./config.json)
    • If you run it in docker, you can use a command similar to this docker run -itd -v $LOCAL_PATH_TO_CONFIG:/usr/src/bot/data/config.json:ro ghcr.io/dfuchss/mensabot

Usage

  • An admin can invite the bot to an unencrypted room. If the room has enabled encryption or if the invite was not sent by an admin, the bot ignores it (without logging it)
  • After the bot has joined, use !mensa help to get an overview of the features of the bot (remember: the bot only responds to admin users)
  • In order to get daily notifications about the food in your canteen, simply use !mensa subscribe. This command will print the room id of the current room into the channel. Add this channel to the list in the config and restart the bot.

Development

I’m typically online in the trixnity channel. So feel free to tag me there if you have any questions.

  • The bot is built using the trixnity framework.
  • The basic functionality is located in Main.kt. There you can also find the main method of the program.
  • Every canteen to be supported has to implement the CanteenAPI. Currently, there is only one implementation for the sw-ka.de interface.