pinhook

a pluggable irc bot framework in python

Tutorial

Installation

$ pip install pinhook

Creating the Bot

To create the bot, just create a python file with the following:

import pinhook.bot

bot = pinhook.bot.Bot(
    channels=['#foo', '#bar'],
    nickname='ph-bot',
    server='irc.freenode.net'
)
bot.start()

This will start a basic bot and look for plugins in the 'plugins' directory to add functionality.

Optional arguments are:

• port: choose a custom port to connect to the server (default: 6667)
• ops: list of operators who can do things like make the bot join other channels or quit (default: empty list)
• plugin_dir: directory where the bot should look for plugins (default: "plugins")

Creating plugins

In your chosen plugins directory ("plugins" by default) make a python file with a function. You can use the @pinhook.plugin.register decorator to tell the bot the command to activate the function.

Use the @pinhook.plugin.register_regex to activate your functions for all messages, that match a regular expression, you define.

The function will need to be structured as such:

import pinhook.plugin

@pinhook.plugin.register('!test')
def test_plugin(msg):
    message = '{}: this is a test!'.format(msg.nick)
    return pinhook.plugin.message(message)

The function will need to accept a single argument in order to accept a Message object from the bot.

The Message object has the following attributes:

• cmd: the command that triggered the function
• nick: the user who triggered the command
• arg: all the trailing text after the command. This is what you will use to get optional information for the command
• channel: the channel where the command was initiated
• ops: the list of bot operators
• botnick: the nickname of the bot

The plugin function must return one of the following in order to give a response to the command:

• pinhook.plugin.message: basic message in channel where command was triggered
• pinhook.plugin.action: CTCP action in the channel where command was triggered (basically like using /me does a thing)

Examples

There are some basic examples in the examples directory in this repository.

For a live and maintained bot running the current version of pinhook see pinhook-tilde.