botd 26

24/7 channel daemon

Welcome to BOTD,

BOTD is a pure python3 IRC chat bot that can run as a background daemon for 24/7 a day presence in a IRC channel. It installs itself as a service so you can get it restarted on reboot. You can use it to display RSS feeds, act as a UDP to IRC gateway, program your own commands for it, have it log objects on disk and search them and scan emails for correspondence analysis. BOTD uses a JSON in file database with a versioned readonly storage. It reconstructs objects based on type information in the path and uses a “dump OOP and use OP” programming library where the methods are factored out into functions that use the object as the first argument.

BOTD is placed in the Public Domain, no COPYRIGHT, no LICENSE.

INSTALL

installation is through pypi:

> sudo pip3 install botd

you can also run directly from the tarball, see https://pypi.org/project/botd/#files

SERVICE

if you want to run the bot 24/7 you can install BOTD as a service for the systemd daemon. You can do this by copying the following into the /etc/systemd/system/botd.service file:

[Unit]
Description=BOTD - 24/7 channel daemon
After=network-online.target

[Service]
DynamicUser=True
StateDirectory=botd
LogsDirectory=botd
CacheDirectory=botd
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/botd
CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_NET_RAW

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

then enable the botd service with:

$ sudo systemctl enable botd
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

to configure the bot use the cfg (config) command (see above). use sudo for the system daemon and without sudo if you want to run the bot locally. then restart the botd service.

$ sudo service botd stop
$ sudo service botd start

if you don’t want botd to startup at boot, remove the service file:

$ sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/botd.service

BOTCTL

BOTD has it’s own CLI, the botctl program. It needs root because the botd program uses systemd to get it started after a reboot. You can run it on the shell prompt and, as default, it won’t do anything.

$ sudo botctl
$

you can use botctl <cmd> to run a command directly, use the cmd command to see a list of commands:

$ sudo botctl cmd
cfg,cmd,dne,dpl,fnd,ftc,log,mbx,rem,rss,tdo,tsk,udp,upt,ver

IRC

configuration is done with the cfg command:

$ sudo botctl cfg
channel=#botd nick=botd port=6667 server=localhost

you can use setters to edit fields in a configuration:

$ sudo botctl cfg server=irc.freenode.net channel=\#dunkbots nick=botd
ok

then restart the botd service:

$ sudo service botd restart

RSS

BOTD provides with the use of feedparser the possibility to server rss feeds in your channel. To add an url use the rss command with an url:

$ sudo botctl rss https://github.com/bthate/botd/commits/master.atom
ok 1

run the rss command to see what urls are registered:

$ sudo botctl fnd rss
0 https://github.com/bthate/botd/commits/master.atom

the ftc (fetch) command can be used to poll the added feeds:

$ sudo botctl ftc
fetched 20

adding rss to mods= will load the rss module and start it’s poller.

$ sudo bot mods=irc,rss

UDP

BOTD also has the possibility to serve as a UDP to IRC relay where you can send UDP packages to the bot and have txt displayed on the channel.

adding the udp to mods= load the udp to irc gateway

$ sudo bot mods=irc,udp

use the ‘botudp’ command to send text via the bot to the channel on the irc server:

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog | botudp

output to the IRC channel can be done with the use python3 code to send a UDP packet to botd, it’s unencrypted txt send to the bot and display on the joined channels.

to send a udp packet to botd in python3:

import socket

def toudp(host=localhost, port=5500, txt=""):
    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
    sock.sendto(bytes(txt.strip(), "utf-8"), host, port)

PROGRAMMING

BOTD provides a “move all methods to functions” like this:

obj.method(*args) -> method(obj, *args)

e.g.

not:

>>> from bot.obj import Object
>>> o = Object()
>>> o.set("key", "value")
>>> o.key
'value'

but:

>>> from bot.obj import Object, set
>>> o = Object()
>>> set(o, "key", "value")
>>> o.key
'value'

it’s a way of programming with objects, replacing OOP. Not object-oriented programming, but object programming. If you are used to functional programming you’ll like it (or not) ;]

MODULES

BOTD provides the following modules:

bot.clk          - clock/repeater
bot.cmd          - commands
bot.dbs          - databases
bot.hdl          - handler
bot.irc          - internet relay chat
bot.obj          - objects
bot.prs          - parser
bot.rss          - rich site syndicate
bot.tbl          - tables
bot.thr          - threads
bot.trm          - terminal
bot.udp          - udp to irc relay
bot.usr          - users
bot.utl          - utilities

DEBUG

if you have previous versions already installed and things fail try to force reinstall:

> sudo pip3 install botd --upgrade --force-reinstall

if this also doesn’t work you’ll need to remove all installed previous versions:

> sudo rm /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/botd*
> sudo rm /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/botlib*

CONTACT

“contributed back to society”

Bart Thate ([e-mail], [e-mail])

botfather on #dunkbots at irc.freenode.net