XMPP bots for humans
Project description
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. The xbotlib
source code and ideas are largely borrowed from the
XMPP bot experiments going on in
Varia.
- Install
- Getting Started
- Working with your bot
- Chatroom
- More Examples
- Deploy your bots
- Roadmap
- Changes
- License
- Contributing
Install
$ pip install xbotlib
Getting Started
Put the following in a echo.py
file. This bot echoes back whatever message
you send it in both direct messages and group messages. In group chats, you
need to message the bot directly (e.g. echobot: hi
) (see the commands
section for more).
from xbotlib import Bot
class EchoBot(Bot):
def direct(self, message):
self.reply(message.text, to=message.sender)
def group(self, message):
self.reply(message.content, room=message.room)
EchoBot()
And then python echo.py
. You will be asked a few questions in order to load
the account details that your bot will be using. This will generate an
echobot.conf
file in the same working directory for further use. See the
configuration section for more.
That's it! If you want to go further, continue reading here.
Working with your bot
The following sections try to cover all the ways you can configure and extend
your bot using xbotlib
. If anything is unclear, please let us know on the
chat.
Documentation
Add a help = "my help"
to your Bot
class like so.
class MyBot(Bot):
help = """This is my cool help.
I can list some commands too:
@foo - some command
"""
Your bot will then respond to mybot: @help
invocations. This string can be a
multi-line string with indentation. xbotlib
will try to format this sensibly
for showing in chat clients.
See more in the commands section for more.
Commands
Using @<command>
in direct messages and <nick>, @<command>
(the ,
is
optional, anything will be accepted here and there doesn't seem to be a
consensus on what is most common way to "at" another user in XMPP) in group chats,
here are the supported commands.
@uptime
: how long the bot has been running@help
: the help text for what the bot does
There are also more general status commands which all bots respond to.
@bots
: status check on who is a bot in the group chat
These commands will be detected in any part of the message sent to the bot. So
you can write echobot, can we see your @uptime
, or I'd love to know which @bots are here.
Avatars
By default, xbotlib
will look for an avatar.png
(so far tested with .png
but other file types may work) file alongside your Python script which contains
your bot implementation. You can also specify another path using the --avatar
option on the command-line interface. The images should ideally have a height
of 64
and a width of 64
pixels each.
Configuration
All the ways you can pass configuration details to your bot. There are three ways to configure your bot, the configuration file, command-line interface and the environment. Use whichever one suits you best. The values are loaded in the following order: command-line > configuration file > environment. This means you can override everything from the command-line easily.
Using the .conf
configuration file
If you run simply run your Python script which contains the bot then xbotlib
will generate a configuration for you by asking a few questions. This is the
simplest way to run your bot locally.
- account: the account of the bot
- password: the password of the bot account
- nick: the nickname of the bot
- avatar: the avatar of the bot (default:
avatar.png
) - redis_url: the Redis connection URL
- rooms: a list of rooms to automatically join (comma separated)
- no_auto_join: disable auto-join when invited (default:
False
) - template: the port to serve from (default:
index.html.j2
) - serve: turn on the web server (default:
False
) - port: the port to serve from (default:
8080
) - storage: storage back-end (default:
file
) - output: path to the output directory (default:
./
)
Using the command-line interface
Every bot accepts a number of comand-line arguments to load configuration. You
can use the --help
option to see what is available (e.g. python bot.py --help
).
- -h, --help: show this help message and exit
- -d, --debug: enable verbose debug logs
- -a ACCOUNT, --account ACCOUNT: account for the bot account
- -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD: password for the bot account
- -n NICK, --nick NICK: nickname for the bot account
- -av AVATAR, --avatar AVATAR: avatar for the bot account (default:
avatar.png
) - -ru REDIS_URL, --redis-url REDIS_URL: redis storage connection URL
- -r ROOMS [ROOMS ...], --rooms ROOMS [ROOMS ...]: Rooms to automatically join
- -naj, --no-auto-join: disable automatically joining rooms when invited (default:
False
) - -pt PORT, --port PORT: the port to serve from (default:
8080
) - -t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE: the template to render (default:
index.html.j2
) - -s, --serve: turn on the web server (default:
False
) - -st {file,redis}, --storage {file,redis}: choice of storage back-end (default:
file
) - -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT: path to the output directory (default:
./
)
Using the environment
xbotlib
will try to read the following configuration values from the
environment if it cannot read them from a configuration file or the
command-line interface. This can be useful when doing remote server
deployments.
- XBOT_ACCOUNT: The bot account
- XBOT_PASSWORD: The bot password
- XBOT_NICK: The bot nickname
- XBOT_AVATAR: The bot avatar icon (default:
avatar.png
) - XBOT_REDIS_URL: Redis key store connection URL
- XBOT_ROOMS: The rooms to automatically join
- XBOT_NO_AUTO_JOIN: Disable auto-joining on invite (default:
False
) - XBOT_TEMPLATE: the template to render (default:
index.html.j2
) - XBOT_SERVE: Turn on the web server (default:
False
) - XBOT_PORT: The port to serve from (default:
8080
) - XBOT_STORAGE: choice of storage back-end (default:
file
) - XBOT_OUTPUT: path to the output directory (default:
./
)
Storage back-end
In order to store data you can make use of the self.db
attribute of the Bot
class. It is a Python dictionary which will be saved to disk automatically for
you as a <nick>.json
in your current working directory. The name and path to
this file can be configured using the output option (e.g. python bot.py --output /var/www/html
)
def group(self, message):
if not message.room in self.db.keys():
self.db[message.room] = "visited"
If you want to inspect the database when the bot is not running, you can look in the file directly.
$ cat <nick>.json
For more advanced use cases, xbotlib
also supports Redis
as a storage back-end. You'll need to configure this (e.g. --storage redis
)
as the default uses the filesystem approach mentioned above. The same self.db
will then be passed as a Redis connection object. You will also need to install
additional dependencies using pip install xbotlib[redis]
.
Loading Plugins
You can specify a plugins = [...]
on your bot definition and they will be
automatically loaded when you start your bot.
class MyBot(Bot):
plugins = ["xep_0066"]
See here for the list of supported plugins.
Serving HTTP
Firstly, you'll need to install additional dependencies.
$ pip install xbotlib[web]
Your bot will run a web server if you configure it to do so. Use the --serve
option on the command-line, the serve = True
configuration option or the
XBOT_SERVE=True
environment variable.
If you're running your bot locally, just visit 0.0.0.0:8080 to see. The default response is just some placeholder text. You can write your own responses using the Bot.serve function.
xbotlib
provides a small wrapper API for
Jinja2 which allows you to
easily template and generate HTML. The web server is provided by
aiohttp.
The default template search path is index.html.j2
in the current working
directory. This can be configured through the usual configuration entrypoints.
It is possible to use the template without the built-in server too!
Here's a small example that renders a random ASCII letter and uses a stylesheet.
index.html.j2
<html>
<head>
<style> h1 { color: red; } </style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>{{ letter }}</h1>
</body>
</html>
bot.py
from string import ascii_letters
async def serve(self, request):
letter = choice(ascii_letters)
rendered = self.template.render(letter=letter)
return self.respond(rendered)
Please note the use of the return
keyword here. The serve
function must
return a response that will be passed to the web server. Also, the async
keyword. This function can handle asynchronous operations and must be marked as
such. You can return any content type that you might find on the web (e.g.
HTML, XML, JSON, audio and maybe even video) but you must specify the
content_type=...
keyword argument for respond
.
See the list of available content types for more.
If you want to pass data from your direct
/group
functions to the serve
function, you'll need to make use of some type of persistent
storage. Your serve
function can read from the storage
back-end and then respond. This is usually as simple as accessing the self.db
attribute.
Invitations
As long as the --no-auto-join
option is not set (via the configuration file
or environment also), then your bot will automatically join any room it is
invited to. Rooms that your bot has been invited to will be stored in the
.xbotlib/data.json
file. If your bot is turned off or fails for some reason
then it will read this file when turned back on to see what rooms it should
re-join automatically. The data.json
file can be edited freely by hand.
API Reference
When writing your own bot, you always sub-class the Bot
class provided from
xbotlib
. Then if you want to respond to a direct message, you write a
direct function. If you want to respond to a group chat
message, you write a group function. That's it for the
basics.
Bot.direct(message)
Respond to direct messages.
Arguments:
- message: received message (see SimpleMessage below for available attributes)
Bot.group(message)
Respond to a message in a group chat.
Arguments:
- message: received message (see SimpleMessage below for available attributes)
Bot.serve(request)
Serve requests via the built-in web server.
See this section for more.
Arguments:
- request: the web request
Bot.routes()
Register additional routes for web serving.
See this section for more.
This is an advanced feature. Use self.web.add_routes
.
from aiohttp.web import get
def routes(self):
self.web.add_routes([get("/foo", self.foo)])
Bot.setup()
Run some setup logic before starting your bot.
SimpleMessage
A simple message interface.
Attributes:
- text: the entire text of the message
- content: the text of the message after the nick
- sender: the user the message came from
- room: the room the message came from
- receiver: the receiver of the message
- nick: the nickname of the sender
- type: the type of message
- url: The URL of a sent file
Bot
Bot.reply(message, to=None, room=None)
Send a reply back.
Arguments:
- message: the message that is sent
- to: the user to send the reply to
- room: the room to send the reply to
Bot.respond(response, content_type="text/html")
Return a response via the web server.
Arguments:
- response: the text of the response
- content_type: the type of response
Other useful attributes on the Bot
class are:
- self.db: The storage back-end
Chatroom
We're lurking in xbotlibtest@muc.vvvvvvaria.org if you want to chat or just invite your bots for testing.
More Examples
See more examples on git.vvvvvvaria.org.
Deploy your bots
Documentation coming soon.
Roadmap
See the issue tracker.
Changes
See the CHANGELOG.md.
License
See the LICENSE.
Contributing
Any and all contributions most welcome! Happy to hear how you use the library or what could be improved from a usability perspective.
To test, install Tox (pip install tox
) and run tox
to run the test suite locally.
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