xbotlib/README.md

xbotlib

XMPP bots for humans

status: experimental

A friendly lightweight wrapper around slixmpp for writing XMPP bots in Python. The goal is to make writing and running XMPP bots easy and fun.

xbotlib is a single file implementation which can easily be understood and extended. It provides a small API surface which reflects the slixmpp way of doing things.

Install

$ pip install xbotlib

Example

from xbotlib import Bot

class EchoBot(Bot):
    def react(self, message):
        if message.type == "chat":
          self.reply(to=message.sender, body=message.body)

MyBot()

And then python echo.py. You will be asked a few questions like which account details your bot will be using. This will generate a bot.conf file in the same working directory for further use.

More Examples

• EchoBot: Sends back what you sent it
• WhisperBot: Pseudo-anonymous whispering in group chats

See the examples directoy for all listings.

API Reference

Your bot always sub-classes the Bot class provided from xbotlib. All underling functions can be extended. For example, if you want to enable more plugins or add different functionality. If something feels awkwardthen please raise a ticket for that. Seamlessness is still a bitch but we're trying anyway.

Bot.react

A function which you define in your bot implementation in order to respond to chat messages. You can respond to both direct messages and group chat messages in this function by checking the message.type which can be either chat or groupchat.

Arguments:

• message: sent message and metadata (see message reference below)

Bot.reply

Send back a response to a direct chat message.

Arguments:

• to: which user account to reply to (direct chat)
• room: which room to reply to (group chat)
• body: the message to send

Message

A simple message format.

Attributes:

• body: the body of the message
• sender: the sender of the message
• receive: the receive of the message
• nickname: the nickname of the sender
• type: the type of message (chat or groupchat)

Roadmap

• The library only handles reactions. The bots can only send messages when they receive a message. It would be nice to allow for sending messages at specific times.

• Extend the bot.conf to allow for multiple bot configurations.

• Sort out something for how to deploy them. It's easy to run them locally but hard to run them on a server. Maybe something can be done for that as well.

Changes

See the CHANGELOG.md.

License

See the LICENSE.