I finally got the bot-tester building! The problem from the last stream turned out to be a simple matter of using .as_ref() when looking inside the Option<Room::Joined>.

Upon running I quickly ran into a new bizar error (Error: leading sigil is incorrect or missing). Since I’m using ? to pass along the errors, I had no context for where this error occured.

$ ../target/debug/matrix-bot-tester -u bot -b client-config.yaml -r client-replay.yaml
Logging in to homeserver http://localhost:8008 as mock_client.
Logged in successfully.
Syncing data...
Sync complete.
Error: leading sigil is incorrect or missing

However, I was able to find via grepping the ruma repo that it had something to do with parsing some kind of ID. The comment attached to the error was considerably better than the error itself…

    /// The ID is missing the correct leading sigil.

I had previously successfully launched the binary with the bot config:

$ ../target/debug/matrix-bot-tester -r bot-replay.yaml -b bot-config.yaml
Logging in to homeserver http://localhost:8008 as bot.
Logged in successfully.
Syncing data...
Sync complete.

so I assumed that the problem was in the one bit of code that was different for client configs. The part that called the newly public create_dm_room. At the time I was passing the username bot to the function let user_id: OwnedUserId = UserId::parse(&user_id_string)?;, apparently that doesn’t work. Luckly, it was a simple matter of changing that to the “full” username: "@bot:synapse-test.localhost".

Then I was faced with another problem. The tester didn’t actually do anything when run. It seems to be hanging on create_dm_room. I’ll figure out what has gone wrong next week.