cottrellio / dbolla

Next generation no bullshit extensible IRC (and Slack) bot

Setting up the bot

D’bolla is a no bullshit extensible IRC/Slack bot written for Python 3.5 using asyncio.

Install dependencies:

pip install websockets

Configure

Copy dbolla.conf.example to dbolla.conf and edit this file. You can specify multiples of the same connection by prefixing the config section with ‘slack:’ or ‘irc:’ followed by a unique name for this connection.

Running

Simply run the command:

./bin/dbolla -c /path/to/my/dbolla.conf

Writing a Plugin

To write a new plugin you must inherit from warmachine.addons.base.WarMachinePlugin. This class defines an interface you must implement in order to interact with connections. If you override __init__ you must call super().

self._loop

This is given to you access to the asyncio loop. This is useful for scheduling tasks to be run later.

self.config_dir

The directory to store any configuration files and other junk in.

self.log

This is a logger that you should use when logging messages.

self.recv_msg(channel, message)

recv_msg is the only required method for a plugin. It is called for every plugin every time a connection receives a message. It takes the arguments connection and message. connection is the Connection object which allows you to interact with that chat server. message is a dictionary containing information about the message received. It has the following format:

{
    'sender': 'sender nickname',
    'channel': '#channel_name or None for private messages',
    'message': 'The message that was received',
}

You will parse message['message'] for what you are interested in and take some action based on what was found.

For example:

async def recv_msg(connection, message):
    """
    A simple echo 'server'.
    """
    # if the message starts with !echo, and it was said in a channel (not a
    # private message)...
    if message['message'].startswith('!echo') and message['channel']:
        # Strip the command !echo from the message
        try:
            msg_to_repeat = ' '.join(message['message'].split(' ')[1:])
        except IndexError:
            # There was nothing to echo
            return
        # Repeat the remainder of the received message
        await connection.say(msg_to_repeat, message['channel'])

self.on_connect(connection)

This method is called when a connection successfully connects and takes the single argument connection. Use this method to do any start up initialization you may want to do such as create configuration files that don’t exist yet.

Writing a Connection

To write a new connection protocol you must inherit from warmachine.connections.base.Connection. This class defines an interface you must implement to support the plugins. If you override __init__ you must call super().

__config_prefix__

This global is used to decide which connection to use when it is found in the config file. E.g. IRC uses 'irc' and Slack uses 'slack'. It should be defined somewhere near the top of your file.

self.config_dir

The directory to store any configuration files and other junk in.

self.connect()

D’bolla uses python 3’s asyncio to manage multiple connections concurrently thus you should use asyncio.open_connection to create your connection. Once you have successfully connected you must set self.status to warmachine.connections.base.CONNECTED. This indicates the connection is ready to use.

self.read()

This method is constantly checked in a loop by the Bot class. When a message is returned it is passed into the recv_msg method in all loaded plugins. This return value should be formatted in the following format:

{
    'sender': 'sender nickname',
    'channel': '#channel_name or None for private messages',
    'message': 'The message that was received',
}

self.say(message, destination)

This method is used by plugins to send a message to a channel or user.

self.id

This should return a unique id used to identify this particular connection. This is used by plugins when saving state. As an example, the IRC connection uses something like this:

@property
@warmachine.utils.decorators.memoize
def id(self):
    from hashlib import md5

    value = '{}-{}'.format(self.host, self.nick)
    return md5(value.encode()).hexdigest()

self.get_users_by_channel(channel)

This method should return a list of all users (including the bot) for the connection.