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Tutorial: Your first bot
Making your own leaf using Autumn is easy. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make a simple Fortune bot that responds to a few basic commands.
Create a new leaf by typing script/generate leaf fortune
. This will create a fortune.rb file in the leaves directory. Edit this file. First we’ll create an array to hold our fortunes:
FORTUNES = [
"You will make someone happy today.",
"Someone you don't expect will be important to you today.",
"Today will bring unexpected hardships."
]
As you can see, our 3 meager fortunes are stored in the FORTUNES
class constant. Now, we’ll want it to respond to the “!fortune” command, and all you have to do is create a method called fortune_command
to make it work:
def fortune_command(stem, sender, reply_to, msg)
FORTUNES.at_rand
end
The at_rand
method is provided by Facets, so you’ll need to add a require 'facets/random'
line at the top of your file. Our method returns a fortune at random, which is automatically transmitted to the channel or nick where the command was received.
Of course, any self-respecting fortune bot announces its presence when it starts up, so, in your Fortune
class, override the did_start_up
method to display a cheerful greeting:
def did_start_up
stems.message 'FortuneBot at your service! Type "!fortune" to get your fortune!'
end
…and that’s it! You now have a fully functional fortune bot featuring — not two — but three unique and exciting fortunes!
(For more on that stems.message
bit, see the README.)
If you want, you can add the fortune bot to your leaves.yml and stems.yml files to try it out. Adding a leaf is easy; simply duplicate the structure used for Scorekeeper’s entry and change the values as appropriate. A typical two-leaf configuration will look like:
Scorekeeper:
class: Scorekeeper
respond_to_private_messages: false
Fortune:
class: Fortune
respond_to_private_messages: true
As you notice, each leaf is given a name. In this example the name happens to be the same as the leaf’s class name, but you could run two copies of a leaf like so:
Fortune1:
class: Fortune
Fortune2:
class: Fortune
</code
We’ve created the leaf, but we have to add it to the stem for it to work. (Remember, a stem is an IRC connection and a leaf is a bot.) So, in your stems.yml file, add an entry for this leaf. Your new config will appear something like:
Example:
nick: Scorekeeper
leaves:
- Scorekeeper
- Fortune
rejoin: true
channel: somechannel
server: irc.someserver.com
When you restart the server, Scorekeeper will come back online but will now
also respond to the “!fortune” command. This is a helpful tutorial on how stems
and leaves are separate. One leaf can have many stems, and one stem can have
many leaves. You can combine these two entities however you need.