Restructuring / refactoring my Mastodon ZorkBot

Now my ZorkBot is working over at @zorkbot@botsin.space I’ve restructured the 3 Lambdas so it’s easier to follow what calls what.

In it’s current/initial working state, I built it with 3 AWS Lambdas:

mastodon-zorkbot

This Lambda runs every 5 minutes, checking for players messaging the bot

  • checks for last replied to messages so it only replies to a message once, using a DynamoDB table
  • if a new reply is needed, sends the game move command from the player to the next Lamdba, mastodonbot-aws-sdk2
  • replies to the player using the Mastodon APIs

The Lambda is deployed as: mastodonbot-zorkbot-dev-mastodon-reply

mastodonbot-aws-sdk2

This Lambda is called by mastodon-zorkbot, and provides parsing of the text responses from the frotz Custom Runtime Lambda, which is calls next

custom-lambda-zork

This is a Docker image for a Custom Lambda Runtime that invokes the frotz binary. This is the zmachine game runtime that runs the Zork game. It could be updated to run any game supported by frotz. The Custom Runtime has a shell script that pipes echo commands into frotz, captures the response and retuns to mastodonbot-aws-sdk2

The Refactoring

For first steps I’m just going to rename the folders of each of the Lamdbas and the serverless.yml service names so it’s easier to track what calls what in sequence:

mastodon-zorkbot -> zorkbot-1-mastodonreplies

mastodonbot-aws-sdk2 -> zorkbot-2-responseparser

custom-lambda-zork -> zorkbot-3-frotzcustomruntime

Will update later with progress.

New AWS Console with ‘favorites’

I just got prompted to switch to the new AWS Console and found this new feature that I’ve always though would be useful, and now here it it 🙂 You can now flag specific services as your ‘favorites’ and they appear in a ribbon bar across the top of your console and in a widget on the console page. Here’s my 3 ‘favorited’ services in the bar at the top of the console:

If you go to ‘Action’ then ‘Add widgets’ you can also add a favorites section and drag it to a location on your console page:

Here it is at the top of my console page:

Previously we had the ‘Recently visited’ section on the Console, but the items in the list would move around depending which you most recently used. Now with favorites you can pin the services you’re most often using so you can more easily access them.

AWS connect-streams api testing locally: issues and workarounds

To initialize the Connect CCP using amazon-connect-streams api in a webpage locally there are several steps to configure. The most likely errors if you haven’t followed all the steps is a X-Frame-Options sameorigin error which you’ll see in your devtools console:

… or a Content Security Policy error if you haven’t added your origin url to Connect’s allowed origins:

Add your origin url to Connect following steps here. If you’re loading from an http server locally, you need to add the full url and port, e.g. https://localhost:8080

Allow cookies: if your default browser settings are to block third-party cookies from different origins, this will prevent the app from loading (you’ll get the same X-Frame-Options error which is confusing). Make sure you allow all the cookies from [your-connect-instance-name].awsapps.com – in the screenshot these should all be allowed: