vtpp2014 / errbot

Errbot is a chatbot, a daemon that connects to your favorite chat service and bring your tools and some fun into the conversation.

Errbot

Errbot is a chatbot. It allows you to start scripts interactively from your chatrooms for any reason: random humour, chatops, starting a build, monitoring commits, triggering alerts...

It is written and easily extensible in Python.

Errbot is available as open-source software and released under the GPL v3 license.

Features

Chat servers support

Built-in

• Slack support
• Hipchat support
• Telegram support
• XMPP support
• IRC support

With add-ons

• Gitter support (See instructions)
• Skype (See instructions)
• Discord (See instructions)
• Cisco Spark (See instructions)
• Matrix (See instructions)
• TOX (See instructions)
• CampFire (See instructions)
• VK (See instructions)
• Mattermost (See instructions)

Administration

After the initial installation and security setup, Errbot can be administered by just chatting to the bot (chatops).

• install/uninstall/update/enable/disable private or public plugins hosted on git
• plugins can be configured from chat
• direct the bot to join/leave Multi User Chatrooms (MUC)
• Security: ACL control feature (admin/user rights per command)
• backup: an integrated command !backup creates a full export of persisted data.
• logs: can be inspected from chat or streamed to Sentry.

Developer features

• Very easy to extend in Python! (see below)
• Presetup storage for every plugin i.e. self['foo'] = 'bar' persists the value.
• Conversation flows to track conversation states from users.
• Webhook callbacks support
• supports markdown extras formatting with tables, embedded images, links etc.
• configuration helper to allow your plugin to be configured by chat
• Graphical and text development/debug consoles
• Self-documenting: your docstrings become help automatically
• subcommands and various arg parsing options are available (re, command line type)
• polling support: your can setup a plugin to periodically do something
• end to end test backend
• card rendering under Slack and Hipchat.

Community and support

If you have:

• a quick question feel free to join us on chat at errbotio/errbot on Gitter.
• a plugin development question please use Stackoverflow with the tags errbot and python.
• a bug to report or a feature request, please use our GitHub project page.

For more general discussion and announcements, you can join us on google plus community. You can also ping us on Twitter with the hashtag #errbot.

Installation

Prerequisites

Errbot runs under Python 3.3+ on Linux, Windows and Mac. For some chatting systems you'll need a key or a login for your bot to access it. Note: Python 2 support is still available in errbot-4.2.x, but it is going away.

Quickstart

We recommend to setup a virtualenv.

1. Install errbot from pip
2. Make a directory somewhere (here called errbot) to host Errbot's data files
3. Initialize the directory
4. Try out Errbot in text mode

$ pip install errbot
$ mkdir errbot; cd errbot
$ errbot --init
$ errbot

It will show you a prompt >>> so you can talk to your bot directly! Try !help to get started.

Adding support for a chat system

For the built-ins, just use one of those options slack, hipchap, telegram, IRC, XMPP with pip, you can still do it after the initial installation to add the missing support for example :

$ pip install "errbot[slack]"

For the external ones (Skype, Gitter, Discord etc ...), please follow their respective github pages for instructions.

Configuration

In order to configure Errbot to connect to one of those chat systems you'll need to tweak the config.py file generated by errbot --init.

To help you, we have a documented template available here: config-template.py.

Note: even if you changed the BACKEND from the configuration, you can still use errbot -T and errbot -G to test out your instance locally (in text and graphic mode respectively).

Starting Errbot as a daemon

If all that worked, you can now use the -d (or --daemon) parameter to run it in a detached mode:

errbot --daemon

Interacting with the Bot

After starting Errbot, you should add the bot to your buddy list if you haven't already. You'll need to invite the bot explicitly to chatrooms on some chat systems too. You can now send commands directly to the bot!

To get a list of all available commands, you can issue:

!help

If you just wish to know more about a specific command you can issue:

!help command

Managing plugins

You can administer the bot in a one-on-one chat if your handle is in the BOT_ADMINS list in config.py.

For example to keyword search in the public plugin repos you can issue:

!repos search jira

To install a plugin from this list, issue:

!repos install <name of repo>

For example !repos install errbotio/err-imagebot.

Writing plugins

Writing your own plugins is extremely simple. errbot --init will have installed in the plugins subdirectory a plugin called err-example you can use as a base.

As an example, this is all it takes to create a "Hello, world!" plugin for Errbot:

from errbot import BotPlugin, botcmd

 class Hello(BotPlugin):
     """Example 'Hello, world!' plugin for Errbot"""

     @botcmd
     def hello(self, msg, args):
         """Return the phrase "Hello, world!" to you"""
         return "Hello, world!"

This plugin will create the command "!hello" which, when issued, returns "Hello, world!" to you. For more info on everything you can do with plugins, see the plugin development guide.

Contribution to Errbot itself

Feel free to fork and propose changes on github