feedbot

A Python jabberbot project to monitor RSS feeds in a chatroom.

• Free software: Apache License
• Documentation: https://feedbot.readthedocs.org.

Description

Feedbot is a Jabberbot based chatbot that will sit in your chatroom and monitor RSS and Atom feeds for you. It currently provides a set of simple commands to blacklist terms from feeds, and a simple interface to add, remove and read feeds and stories.

Installing

Feedbot runs as an application rather than a library because it has concrete dependencies on versions of Jabberbot and xmpppy that are not available on the Cheeseshop.

Having said that, installation is still straightforward.

$ git clone https://github.com/liavkoren/feedbot.git

followed by

$ python pip install -r requirements.txt

If you would like to work on Feedbot, simply install the test_requirments from test_requirements.txt. Docs can be build from the doc/ directory with

$ make html

Quickstart

A minimal install requires setting up a script that will launch Feedbot with the correct settings:

Eg:

import logging
from feedbot import bot

BOT_NICKNAME = 'Feedbot'
BOT_PASSWORD = 'l33t'
BOT_USERNAME = 'feedbot@botbot.org'
CHATROOM = 'bot-party@conference.bot.org'
SERVER_IP = '0.0.0.0'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    feedbot = bot.FeedBot(
        CHATROOM,
        BOT_USERNAME,
        BOT_PASSWORD,
        server=SERVER_IP,
    )

    logging.info("Feedbot is alive")
    feedbot.muc_join_room(CHATROOM, BOT_NICKNAME)
    feedbot.serve_forever()
    logging.info("Feedbot is dead")

Settings

FeedBot has a few user-definable settings. To override the default settings, simply create an environment variable with the correct settings-key and value.

• FEED_HISTORY_QUEUE_LENGTH: Every feed stores a history of entries that have already been shown in the channel. This settings controls how many entries that queue holds. Default is 200.
• FEEDBOT_DATA_DIRECTORY: The location on disk where the FeedBot will save feeds data. Feed data is saved as human readable JSON. By default FeedBot will attempt to find the current user's home directory and create a ~/.feedbot directory there. If $HOME is not set, FeedBot will issue a warning and attempt to create a directory in /tmp/feedbot
• FEEDBOT_DATA_FILENAME: Name of the FeedBot data file. Default is feedbot.conf

Credits

Built at VM Farms, by Liav Koren using Feedparser and Jabberbot. Tests are built with pytest and mock. Packaging was done with Cookiecutter and Jeff Knupp's excellent walk-through: http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/08/16/open-sourcing-a-python-project-the-right-way/