code generator for messaging bot in multiple platforms
Project description
xbot
xbot (read cross-bot), is a code generation tool to translate your messaging bot code for other messaging platform.
Problem: I built my bot in X (e.g. Telegram) and now I want to have it also in Y (Discord) and Z (Slack). xbot solution: xbot takes your code for X and generates automatically code for Y and Z, afterward you can still test it and edit it as you wish. xbot does only the boilerplate part, is up to you what you do with it.
Why not having a multiplatform bot? There are some solution there around multiplatform bot, but different messaging platform offer different features, e.g. in Telegram you can have rich bot UI and in Discord you can display a "Bot is typing" message. More then that you might want to have different deployment strategies for different bot, so with we don't want to force any opinion around what you do with your code.
Usage
To generate python code (statically) you can
xbot my_telegram_bot.py --from python-telegram-bot --to discord.py
where python-telegram-bot
is the wrapper you are using to write your Telegram bot.
The main principle around xbot is the generated code will always run, even if to do that we need to deprecate some features in the migration.
How does it work
xbot is built around the concept that different bot APIs wrappers pretty much works the same way just with different syntax. Here is an example with python-telegram-bot(A) and discord.py(B).
# python-telegram-bot, (A)
def add(update, context):
"""Add two numbers together."""
try:
message = update.message.text
_, left, right = message.split(" ")
result = int(left) + int(right)
update.message.reply_text(result)
except (IndexError, ValueError):
update.message.reply_text('Usage: /add <left> <right>')
# discord.py, (B)
@bot.command(name='add')
async def add(ctx):
"""Adds two numbers together."""
try:
message = ctx.message.content
_, left, right = message.split(" ")
result = int(left) + int(right)
await ctx.send(result)
except (IndexError, ValueError):
await ctx.send('Usage: /add <left> <right>')
There is a bunch of differences with the two wrappers, but they practically do the same job.
- (A) is sync, (B) is async
- (A) uses plain handlers, (B) uses decorators
- (A) sends a message with
update.message.reply_text
, (B) withawait ctx.send
NOTE: we are not using the two wrapper in the most idiomatic way we could, but both exampls are still reasonable real-life working examples.
So how can we effectively translate from (A) to (B)? We can use a Jinja2 template to generate (B)
# discord.py, (B)
# xbot TEMPLATE
@bot.command(name='{{function_name}}')
async def {{function_name}}(ctx):
"""
{{function_docstring}}
"""
{{ body }}
This basic template we can easily generate the original (B) code, where in {{body}} we are replacing stuff like update.message.text
to ctx.message.content
.
Given that template we just need to parse (A) (we can use it walking the AST for example) to get the values like function name, arguments and body and then just pass them to (B).
Contributing
To add a new translation platform this is the checklist
- add a TEMPLATE for you library at
xbot/templates/WRAPPER_NAME/reply.py
(to see the full lists of templates and libraries checkxbot/constants.py
) - add a DICTIONARY in
xbot/parsers/WRAPPER_NAME/dictionary.py
(that maps to theMetaDictionary
inxbot/templates.py
) - [optional] add a PARSER if you want to translate from your platform to another platform in
xbot/parsers/WRAPPER_NAME/parser.py
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