errbot-hl 8.0.5

Chat servers support

Built-in

• IRC support

• Telegram support

• XMPP support

With add-ons

• Slack support (See instructions)

• Discord (See instructions)

• Gitter support (See instructions)

• Webex (See instructions)

• Mattermost (See instructions)

• RocketChat (See instructions)

• Skype (See instructions)

• TOX (See instructions)

• VK (See instructions)

• Zulip (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

• 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

Prerequisites

Errbot runs under Python 3.6+ on Linux, Windows and Mac. For some chatting systems you’ll need a key or a login for your bot to access it.

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 telegram, IRC, XMPP with pip, you can still do it after the initial installation to add the missing support for example

$ pip install "errbot[irc]"

For the external ones (Slack, Discord, Gitter, Skype, 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 to test out your instance locally in text mode.

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

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.