Lavenza

About

Lavenza is a Node.js module that aims to make development of multi-platform chatbots easy, fun and robust.

It is fully written in Typescript and is fully Object-Oriented.

Lavenza is NOT a bot. It is actually a framework for developers to create bots in a cleaner fashion. Its goals are to:

• Facilitate and expand upon bot development.
• Facilitate the execution of multiple bots within a single application
• Facilitate the development of bots that simultaneously connect to multiple platforms and share information between them.

Currently Supported Clients

• Discord
• Twitch

Future Clients

• Slack (V4)
• Youtube (V5)

Installation & Quickstart

Node.js 6.0.0 or newer is required to run Lavenza.

Use NPM to install the package

It is highly recommended to install it as a dependency to your package and NOT globally!

npm install lavenza;

Getting Ready

The best way to experience Lavenza is to go through the process of setting up a couple bots with it!

Before proceeding, you'll need to do a little bit of diving into the clients to gather some important info for the bot you'll create. For the sake of this example, I'm going to be using the name pizzabot. Feel free to replace occurrences of this name with a name of your choosing.

Discord

All Discord Bots must be registered on the Discord Developers website.

More Details coming soon I promiseee...

Twitch

Twitch bots basically live on an account you create for them. You can go ahead and create an account for your Twitch Bot if you haven't already! Create one using the normal sign up process.

More Details coming soon I promiseee...

Now there are two ways to setup Lavenza. You can either opt for the Manual Installation or the CLI Installation. Follow your preference! The CLI setup might be a little harder to get into, but includes a cool interactive CLI process and some useful utility commands.

CLI Installation

Setup your $PATH

To access the lavenza CLI command, you must add the following line in your $PATH.

# Add this to ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or ~/.profile, etc.
export PATH="./node_modules/.bin:$PATH"

Windows Users can find out how to alter the path for whatever program their using.

If you're using the regular CMD, then you may be able to adjust your System Variables directly. You can add .\node_modules\.bin;. as one of the entries there!

Here's an example for Cmder users. You can add this in your 'CMDER_ROOT/config/user_profile.cmd'

:: Add node_modules bins to PATH.
:: With this, you can access bins from installed dependant modules from the root of your NodeJS packages.
set "PATH=.\node_modules\.bin;%PATH%"

Now, so long as your in the root of your module, you can access any binaries that have been installed as modules, such as the lavenza bin!

Run Lavenza's provisioning script and follow the instructions.

lavenza provision;

The instructions will take you through the whole process. At the time of writing this, the CLI is still in its natal stages and isn't perfect. If you run into any errors, the best way to start clean is to delete the created lavenza directory as well as the .lavenza.yml file. Then, you can run lavenza provision again!

One of the steps will ask for you to specify an installation directory. You can set this to lavenza.

A second README file will be created at this path. Consult this README for a more detailed explanation on how things work!

Manual Installation

If for whatever reason you can't get the CLI setup, go through with these steps!

It seems pretty daunting but it's just moving folders around and modifying text. :)

For the sake of this example, let's pretend we want to create a bot called pizzabot!

1. COPY the ./node_modules/lavenza/templates/installation folder to the root of your module and rename it to lavenza.
2. COPY the ./node_modules/lavenza/templates/lavenzafile/.lavenza.yml to the root of your module.
3. COPY the ./lavenza/bots/example folder and create a duplicate folder at the same location. Rename this new folder to pizzabot.
4. RENAME ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/example.js to ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/pizzabot.js.
5. RENAME ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/.env.example to ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/.env.
6. OPEN ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/config.yml and alter them to your leisure. Don't worry about Talents or the Locale configurations for now! If you want to get ahead of yourself, you can add - Twitch after the last line in this file to prepare for Twitch Bot support!
7. OPEN ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/.env. Here, you need to fill in the values for DISCORD_TOKEN, DISCORD_CLIENT_ID and finally TWITCH_OAUTH_TOKEN IF you're using Twitch. Use the values you gathered earlier.
8. BROWSE through the ./lavenza/bots/pizzabot/clients folder and edit all relevant client files for the clients you set up. The values to modify here are pretty straightforward! There are comments to help you out.
9. OPEN the ./.lavenza.yml file at the root of your module.
10. Change line 9 to root: lavenza.
11. Change line 27 to master: pizzabot. Replace pizzabot with the name of your bot if it's different!

Annnd that should be everything! You can move on to the Execution section now!

Running Lavenza

CLI Execution

lavenza summon;

JS Execution

Alternatively, in your javascript code, paste the following to run Lavenza.

// Require the module.
const Lavenza = require('lavenza');

// Initialize Lavenza.
// This will read everything found in your lavenza installation folder and do what's necessary to run your bots.
// Initialize must always run before summoning.
Lavenza.initialize().then(() => {
  Lavenza.summon();
});

- November 15, 2018 -

...Oh! Hi! Didn't see you there.

The name's Aigachu. You may or may not know me. But that's unimportant.

I've made many bots over the last few years. Many of which were dirty, code wise. This project is sort of a...Battle! A personal battle to make a clean, fun application. Hopefully I can look back at this code in a few years and not cringe or fight back puke. But chances are I will if things go the way they always do. Haha!

My goal with this project is to make bot development easy and scalable. I also want to be proud of a project and see it to the end for once... Let's see how far I get with this one!

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to make my best Discord bot in PHP. This quickly changed as I realized that PHP would probably not be the best solution if I planned on making bots that would be compatible with a bunch of different platforms.

This original PHP project was named Lavenza. This brings me to the name of this project. Lavenza II. It's the successor to this PHP project and looks to follow clean design patterns as much as possible, despite Javascript's tendency to be more procedural...That in itself is a battle, but it's not impossible!

In any case...I don't even know why I'm writing a preface. Enjoy the code!

- September 06, 2019 -

...OH! Hello again!

I almost typoed that as 'Hell again'! LOL! Now wouldn't THAT be a mood.

So don't ask me why I'm writing another one of these. Maybe I just enjoy talking to myself. BUT HEY. It's fun to have a nice record of how I've been feeling along the evolution of Lavenza. :) I'm sure I'll come back and read this in a few months and cringe. HAHA. But WHATEVER!

Lavenza's still going along strong. It's funny to think back to the original PHP version of it. Heck, it's even funnier to reminisce about Colette, my first ever Discord Bot. For the amount of features she had (which funnily enough is not far from the amount of features Lavenza has!), the code was ATROCIOUS. All written in ONE file, spanning about 1000 lines. But you know what? Colette was working. She was live, in quite a few servers back when Discord was the new hotness and bots were just beginning to be developed.

Lavenza is quite different from that. It just goes to show how much I've evolved as a developer. I won't say I'm a god. Far from that, actually. I'm sure I have a lot to learn still. But I'm quite proud of how things turned out. I'm sure there are savants out there that can do what I did in a much cleaner, more efficient way. But I'm just happy to have something I can say I made, and be proud of it.

Lavenza III is on the horizon! We went from PHP to Javascript, and while it was a nice switch, Javascript just wasn't cutting it when I wanted to do some GOOD OOP. I had to wrestle with Javascript to achieve OOP, and to be fair I kind of did achieve it. As much as I could really (except when I got impatient!). But it's time for a new step. Typescript baby. The dawn of a new era!

It's fun to think about where things will head in the next few months or years. Back when I wrote the last preface, and for quite some time afterwards, I would always ask myself how I could make Lavenza even cleaner than I already had. Now the doors have opened for much more, and in the months to come I feel like I'll find even more ways to improve this project. Maybe we'll switch to another programming language AGAIN! Who knows what the future holds!

Alright, I think I've written enough. Let's get back to work! :D

As always, ENJOY THE CODE!

- November 25th, 2019 -

So...One year huh. Wow.

Here I am in Greece, at 7:45 AM, typing up another preface for this project. I must really cherish Lavenza. HAHA.

Hello again! Welcome to yet another entry in what seems to be a chronicle of the development of this framework of mine, where I empty my thoughts and think about the future. HAHA. Trust me, this is more therapeutic than it seems.

I find it funny how the last entry was two months ago and I ended with "Lavenza III is on the horizon!". Truth is, we're already at Lavenza IV. The changes I made after dropping version III were...Huge, to say the least. But man is Lavenza IV clean.

Lavenza feels even more like a framework now. There are mountains of work to do until I can truly say that the project is complete, but in its current state it's definitely usable and accomplishes A LOT. Making multiple bots has never been easier for me, and I've done so much. Bash commands for an interactive process...Service container logic to allow for intricate feature development...God, so much.

By day, I work a 9 to 5 as a Drupal developer. Anyone that has touched Drupal will feel its inspiration when looking at the inner workings of the framework. I inspired myself from Drupal a lot, or at least the good parts of it. But it just makes me wonder...How many more technologies will I touch in the next few years? And how many of them will inspire me enough that I bleed its essence into this project?

Exciting, honestly. To think about how Lavenza V or Lavenza VI will look. But for now, I think we're good.

As I love to say, I'm no god nor do I even consider myself a good developer. There are excellent developers out there that enjoy it more and are miles better at it than I am. But I just realize how important it is to do something, for yourself, and to be proud of it.

Chances are Lavenza IV will be the running version for awhile. Far longer than version III's lifecycle! LOL! But it isn't because I have nothing left to do. There is still a lot to be done, a lot to improve and clean up. Hell, more clients to configure and cover support for. But version IV is where we'll do a lot of stabilization. We'll clean up some code, we'll do some bugfixes, and we'll try to make it absolutely amazing.

In its current state, even if Lavenza is usable, it's not something I would reveal to the public yet. But I want version V to be just that. Stable and good enough for me to make others use it. And that's going to be the goal starting now.

What's even more exciting though...Another project has begun. The first official project of mine to make use of Lavenza: Estrella.

...Why am I even adding a link there? It's a private project! HAHA. But hey, if you have access to that, then know that it's an honor to work with you.

All of this being said, I look forward to seeing where Lavenza goes. And I'm going to continue enjoying the ride.

...Anyways, it's time for enjoy the rest of my time in Athens. Next preface? When Lavenza V drops.

See you then.