Introbot

The idea here is to take lalita , which is already an easy-to-use irc bot, and make it easy for someone completely new to programming to write an IRC bot.

Getting started

• download this project (use the “Download Source” button up top in github) and untar or unzip it
• optional: this gets you a “sandboxed” python install, so you can install whatever other stuff you need
  • download virtualenv
  • run virtualenv.py sandbox
  • run source sandbox/bin/activate
• run python setup.py develop
• run introbot channelname. Your bot will appear in #channelname on freenode.
• you can ping the bot in IRC with something like “dustinbot: ping”

Hacking

• open introbot/actions.py and edit it. Don’t look at the other files – they are not introductory-level.
• to run your bot without an IRC server, run textbot instead.

Suggestions

• Use ‘if’ statemnts to respond to some commands like “dance” or “yo mamma”
  • use string operations to break commands apart: split or startswith
• Use the random.choice function to choose a random quote on request
• Use a dictionary to give answers to questions posed in IRC
• Reply to everything in ROT13

Reference

• Google’s Python Class