Plugin development

Plugins form the heart of Errbot. From the ground up, it is designed to be extended entirely through plugins. In this guide we will explain the basics of writing simple plugins, which we then follow up on further with sets of recipes on a range of topics describing how to handle more advanced use-cases.

• 1. Intro
  • 1.1. Requirements
  • 1.2. Prior knowledge
• 2. Development environment
  • 2.1. Loading plugins from a local directory
  • 2.2. Local test mode
  • 2.3. Plugin scaffolding
• 3. Hello, world!
  • 3.1. Anatomy of a BotPlugin
  • 3.2. Plugin metadata
  • 3.3. Python Submodules
  • 3.4. Packaging
  • 3.5. Wrapping up
  • 3.6. Next steps
• 4. Advanced bot commands
  • 4.1. Automatic argument splitting
  • 4.2. Subcommands
  • 4.3. Argparse argument splitting
  • 4.4. Commands using regular expressions
• 5. Messaging
  • 5.1. Returning multiple responses
  • 5.2. Sending a message to a specific user or room
  • 5.3. Templating
  • 5.4. Cards
  • 5.5. Trigger a callback with every message received
• 6. Presence
  • 6.1. Callbacks for presence changes
  • 6.2. Change the presence or status of the bot
• 7. Mentions
  • 7.1. How to use it
  • 7.2. Identifying if the bot itself has been mentioned
• 8. Persistence
  • 8.1. How to use it
  • 8.2. Caveats
• 9. Configuration
  • 9.1. Plugin configuration through the built-in !config command
  • 9.2. Supplying partial configuration
  • 9.3. Using custom configuration checks
• 10. Streams
  • 10.1. Waiting for incoming file transfers
  • 10.2. Sending a file to a user or a room
• 11. Plugin Dependencies
  • 11.1. Declaring dependencies
  • 11.2. Using dependencies
• 12. Dynamic plugins (advanced)
  • 12.1. Defining new commands
  • 12.2. Registering the new plugin
  • 12.3. Refreshing a plugin
  • 12.4. Customizing the type of commands and parameters
• 13. Scheduling
  • 13.1. Calling a function at a regular interval
• 14. Webhooks
  • 14.1. Simple webhooks
  • 14.2. Handling JSON request
  • 14.3. Handling form-encoded requests
  • 14.4. The raw request
  • 14.5. Returning custom headers and status codes
  • 14.6. Testing a webhook through chat
• 15. Testing your plugins
  • 15.1. Interacting with the bot
  • 15.2. Helper methods
  • 15.3. Pattern
  • 15.4. All together now
  • 15.5. PEP-8 and code coverage
  • 15.6. Travis and Coveralls
• 16. Logging
• 17. Exception Handling
• 18. Plugin compatibility settings
  • 18.1. Errbot compatibility
• 19. Backend-specifics
  • 19.1. Getting to the bot object
  • 19.2. Getting to the underlying client library

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