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SleekBot - an extendable XMPP/Jabber Bot
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Description
===========

SleekBot is an easily extendable Bot for XMPP (aka Jabber, Google Talk, etc) written in Python.

Plugins, also written in Python, are used to add new commands and text parsers to your Bot. These new functionalities are declared by decorating python functions. Plugins can be added, removed or reloaded without stopping the Bot thereby providing a useful upgrade path.


Instalation
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The best way to install SleekBot is using virtualenv (http://virtualenv.openplans.org/) and pip (http://pip.openplans.org/). If you don't know what this is, read http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/15/pip/.

    pip install -E sleekbot -r http://github.com/hgrecco/SleekBot/raw/master/requirements_pip.txt

Which is roughly equivalent to

    virtualenv --no-site-packages sleekbot
    source sleekbot/bin/activate
    pip install dnspython
    pip install -e git://github.com/fritzy/SleekXMPP.git#egg=sleekxmpp
    pip install -e git://github.com/hgrecco/SleekBot.git#egg=sleekbot
    deactivate


Running
=======

First, activate your virtual environment:

    source sleekbot/bin/activate

Bots are configured using a xml file. Create a template configuration file by running:

    runbot.py -n config.xml

Edit config.xml with your favorite editor. The file is fully documented, so it should be easy to understand what is the purpose of each entry. Among other thing, you will
* Configure username and password of your bot so it can log in to a server
* Configure access control lists
* Select which plugins are going to be loaded
* Select which XEPs your bot is going to support

Run your bot:

    runbot.py config.xml

and talk to it using your favorite XMPP client.


Build your own plugins
======================

To build your own plugin, you need to create a class derived from BotPlugin and expose the desired methods using the @botcmd decorator. By default, the method name will be used as the command name and the docstring will be used for the help.

For example, paste the following code in a file named echo.py


from sleekbot.commandbot import botcmd
from sleekbot.plugbot import BotPlugin

class echo(BotPlugin):
    """ A plugin to echo your message."""

    @botcmd()
    def echo(self, command, args, msg):
        """ Repeats your message back to you."""
        return args


Copy echo.py into your plugins folder. If your followed the described installation process, the plugins folder is:

    sleekbot/src/sleekbot/sleekbot/plugins

Then, you will need to add the following line to your bot configuration file:

    <plugin name='echo' />

Now start your bot and try your new plugin!

If you want to keep you plugins appart, create a package folder (a folder with a __init__.py file inside) within the python search path and put echo.py there.

If your package folder is named myplugins then the line in the config file should be:

    <plugin name='echo' package='myplugins'/>


Note: The folder containing the configuration file is automatically added to the python path. So a simple organization is to put all your config files in a folder and your plugins package folder


Requirements
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* Python 2.5 or newer
* SleekXMPP
* dnspython


Contribute
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If you'd like to hack on SleekBot, you can start by forking my repo on GitHub:

http://github.com/hgrecco/SleekBot

The best way to get your changes merged back into core is as follows (thanks Gollum):
   1. Clone your fork
   2. Create a thoughtfully named topic branch to contain your change
   3. Hack away
   4. Test, test, test
   5. Document your code.
   6. Do not change the version number, I will do that on my end
   7. If necessary, rebase your commits into logical chunks, without errors
   8. Push the branch up to GitHub
   9. Send me a pull request for your branch

I keep to branches on GitHub.
- master: appropriate for SleekBot users. It is always working.
- develop: appropriate for SleekBot developers. Might not be in a fully usable state.

Additionally, other branches might appear as testing ground for new features or big API changes.


Authors
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Hernan E. Grecco <hernan.grecco@gmail.com>

Contributors:
- Rafael Römhild <rafael@roemhild.de>


Original by Nathan Fritz and Kevin Smith http://github.com/Kev/SleekBot/

See HISTORY.txt for more details