Quickstart

Getting your own bot up and running is very simple. In the root of the project directory, create a config.json file. There is an example included in etc/config.json. The only required field to get it started is a slack token, it can either be for an existing user or you can create a new bot integration.

Once you have a token, place it in the config and try to start your bot with the bin/start binary. This should have the bot join the global default channel (usually named #general). You can then invite the bot into other channels.

Plugins

In order to add plugins to the bot, you will define a plugins array in the json package. It should be an array of strings that are names of the plugin modules to load. Included in this repository are the Ext Plugin, About Plugin, and Admin Plugin plugins. If you want to create your own plugin you should add a file to either the main PYTHONPATH or into the src/plugins/ folder. This plugin should import the bot attribute from the injected app module. This attribute is a Lazbot instance and offers various decorators to tie into event hooks in the bot. A simple example would be something like:

from app import bot
from datetime import datetime

@bot.listen("what time is it?")
def tell_time(user, channel):
   bot.post(channel,
      text="{!s} it is {!s}".format(user, datetime.now().time())
   )

This will listen for anyone posting in any channel the bot is in to say what time is it? and the bot will respond.

If you want to create more complex plugins, you can include the plugin as a directory with a __init__.py file that handles importing the various parts.

Config

If you want to add in additional configuration for your plugins, the config.json dictionary is included in the app module as config. You just need to import this along with the bot attribute and read from it. The included plugins have their own additional configuration that you can read about on each page.