So you just thought of the next killer Hubot script and you want to share it with the world? Well if you haven’t been paying attention, you should know that the hubot-scripts community has changed their contributing policy:

It’s now preferred that if you are able to, you should release your script as part of a npm package built for Hubot.

And it’s a good change, because this now allows scripts to be distributed and versioned as individual NPM packages. This also means that individual scripts can easily declare dependencies, which is a big improvement.

If you’re familiar with the process for creating a NPM package, then you’re off to a good start. We’re going to be using yeoman and the generator-hubot-script to generate all the boilerplate necessary for quickly creating a NPM package for our Hubot script.

NOTE: The generated boilerplate is based on the hubot-example repository.

Now let’s ago head and install yeoman and the generator-hubot-script using NPM:

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$ npm install -g yo generator-hubot-script

Secondly, let’s go ahead and create a directory for our script. For the sake of this example, we’re gonna assume we created a script called foobar.coffee, so we want to appropriately namespace our package with the name hubot-foobar:

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$ mkdir hubot-foobar
$ cd hubot-foobar
$ yo hubot-script:foobar

Follow the prompts and wait until the NPM install completes. Now let’s initialize the directory as a Git repository and commit our initial files:

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$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"
[master (root-commit) 5871342] Initial commit
 10 files changed, 175 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
 create mode 100644 .travis.yml
 create mode 100644 Gruntfile.js
 create mode 100644 README.md
 create mode 100644 index.coffee
 create mode 100644 package.json
 create mode 100755 script/bootstrap
 create mode 100755 script/test
 create mode 100644 src/hello-world.coffee
 create mode 100644 test/hello-world-test.coffee

Cool, so now all the boilerplate is in place, it’s out with the old and in with the new:

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$ cp ~/some/location/foobar.coffee src/
$ git add src/foobar.coffee
$ git rm src/hello-world.coffee
$ git commit -m "Add foobar script"
[master 4f4c612] Add foobar script
 1 file changed, 22 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 src/foobar.coffee
 delete mode 100644 src/hello-world.coffee

Unit testing is cool, so let’s go ahead and set that up:

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$ git mv test/hello-world-test.coffee test/foobar-test.coffee
$ vim test/foobar-test.coffee # update file to test your script
$ grunt test

Once you have some passing test cases, let’s go ahead and commit these changes:

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$ git add test/hello-world-test.coffee
$ git commit -m "Update test cases"
[master 35d124a] Update test cases
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

Next, you want to go ahead and update the package.json file to include all the relevant information for your script. Make sure the following fields are all satisfactory:

• author
• description
• version
• author
• license
• keywords
• repository
• bugs
• dependencies

More details on this file can be found here. Once you’re done, go ahead and commit your changes:

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$ git add package.json
$ git commit -m "Update package.json"
[master 78c3233] Update package.json
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Lastly, go ahead and review the README.md file. Feel free to make any changes, and add any missing documentation you think is necessary. Make sure to commit any changes you make.

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$ git add README.md
$ git commit -m "Update README"
[master f94cd40] Update README
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Congratulations, you’ve packaged your Hubot script and are ready to share it with the world! So go ahead and push this repository to Github or publish the package on NPM.