Debugging/printing in a Hubot script

Question

I\'m trying to debug an existing Hubot script and in the future write my own, and I need an easy way to debug it or at least print values somewhere (but not to the channel). How

Answer 1

You can use

robot.logger.info "your log message here"

That will log it just like the other hubot messages get logged.

Answer 2

I have discovered the answer myself: console.log MSG in a .coffee Coffeescript source does exactly what I needed.

Answer 3

I don't know if this helps but I found a way to inspect objects.

Util = require "util"

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.hear /hi robot/i, (msg) ->
    user = robot.brain.usersForFuzzyName(msg.message.user.name)
    msg.send "#{Util.inspect(user)}"

This allowed be to see all the elements of the object so I could figure out what I was doing wrong...

Answer 4

Found this (coffeescript) snippet somewhere which logs all errors, quite helpful to add to bots in development.

robot.error (err, res) -> robot.logger.error "#{err}\n#{err.stack}" if res? res.reply "#{err}\n#{err.stack}"