2. Development environment

Before we dive in and start writing our very first plugin, I’d like to take a moment to show you some tools and features which help facilitate the development process.

2.1. Loading plugins from a local directory

Normally, you manage and install plugins through the built-in !repos command. This installs plugins by cloning them via git, and allows updating of them through the !repos update command.

During development however, it would be easier if you could load your plugin(s) directly, without having to commit them to a Git repository and instructing Errbot to pull them down.

This can be achieved through the BOT_EXTRA_PLUGIN_DIR setting in the config.py configuration file. If you set a path here pointing to a directory on your local machine, Errbot will (recursively) scan that directory for plugins and attempt to load any it may find.

2.2. Local test mode

You can run Errbot in a local single-user mode that does not require any server connection by passing in the –text (or -T) option flag when starting the bot.

In this mode, a very minimal back-end is used which you can interact with directly on the command-line. It looks like this:

$ errbot -T
[...]
INFO:Plugin activation done.
Talk to  me >> _

2.3. Plugin scaffolding

Plugins consist of two parts, a special .plug file and one or more Python (.py) files containing the actual code of your plugin (both of these are explained in-depth in the next section). Errbot can automatically generate these files for you so that you do not have to write boilerplate code by hand.

To create a new plugin, run errbot –new-plugin (optionally specifying a directory where to create the new plugin - it will use the current directory by default). It will ask you a few questions such as the name for your plugin, a description and which versions of errbot it will work with and generate a plugin skeleton from this with all the information filled out automatically for you.