HuBot with HipChat: connecting, listening but not talking

Question

I am try to configure HuBot to work with HipChat. My HuBot appears to be connecting and listening correctly, however is not responding to anything. I would appreciate any thoughts on what the problem could be, or how to go about debugging the issue myself.

How I've set up the bot

Initially I followed the instructions for installing Hubot with the HipChat adapter onto Heroku. However the bot did not respond.

As it was my first time using Heroku, I then switched to running the bot from an Ubuntu 12.04 server, so that I could more easily see what was going on. For this I took inspiration from the UNIX deployment instructions for HuBot

So I now have the bot running on Ubuntu, being fired up from the command line.

Reading the logs

The HuBot logs show:

1. That the bot connects to HipChat succesfully. Additionally I can see the bot connected from my desktop HipChat client
2. The the bot has connected as the correct user and is listening to the correct name.
3. That the bot receives message from HipChat. If I type a message from another account into the HipChat client, it then appears in the bot's logs.
4. There are no errors appearing in the logs

However after a message has been received by Hubot, it never send anything out. With the exception of a blank message every 30 seconds (I am assuming this is to keep the connection to HipChat alive):

[Thu Jun 20 2013 18:55:11 GMT+0100 (BST)] DEBUG  OUT > 

I can't find any troubleshooting guides for HuBot or work out myself how to debug the issue.

Answer 1

When I ran into this issue it was when I specified the HUBOT_HIPCHAT_HOST. Removing that setting made it work again (it appeared to be selecting an incorrect JID on the reply).

Update: This issue was resolved https://github.com/hipchat/hubot-hipchat/issues/160