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2007 / python-jabberbot: A simple Jabber Bot for Python

jabberbot 0.4: A simple Jabber Bot for Python

Programming your own Jabber bot can be fun and helpful. This is python-jabberbot, a Jabber bot framework for Python that enables you to easily write simple Jabber bots. You can use your Jabber bots to provide information about your running systems, to make your website interact with your visitors or notify you about updates or changes you monitor with your Python scripts.

[...] now I have the 'bot bug' and I want to write bots for all kinds of things, since it's so easy to do. Thanks again!

This Jabber bot is partly inspired by the xmpppy example bot.py, but designed to be re-usable and to make it easy to write small Jabber bots that do one thing and do it well.

Update 2008-11-13: Vicent Tamarit has used this jabberbot and modified it to work with natural language, so the user has a conversation with the bot and the bot schedules a TV recording for the user. Vicent plans to improve his ideas further and will send us some code after he finished his changes (TVBot, programming the TV with Jabber)

License: GNU General Public License, Version 3 or later (GPLv3)

Freshmeat.net project page
Python Package Index / CheeseShop

Dependencies

Documentation

Download

ChangeLog

  • 2007-07-28: Initial release
  • 2007-09-17: Merged patch from John Martinez
  • 2007-10-19: Merged patch from Dan Sanders
  • 2008-07-12: Add setup.py, prepare for CheeseShop, tarball

The detailed ChangeLog can be found here: ChangeLog

Usage

  1. Import the class: from jabberbot import JabberBot
  2. Subclass the JabberBot class
  3. Add methods starting with bot_, these will be exported as commands (e.g. def bot_display_id( self, mess, args)); the methods should return the message sent back to the user as string (or None if the command gives no reply)
  4. Create an instance of your bot, supplying username and password
  5. Call the serve_forever() method of your instance
  6. You can call the send() method on your bot to send messages to specific users

Example code

A more advanced example implementing a broadcasting bot with user management and threading can be found here: jabberbot-example.py. 

from jabberbot import JabberBot
import datetime

class SystemInfoJabberBot(JabberBot):
    def bot_serverinfo( self, mess, args):
        """Displays information about the server"""
        version = open('/proc/version').read().strip()
        loadavg = open('/proc/loadavg').read().strip()

        return '%s\n\n%s' % ( version, loadavg, )
    
    def bot_time( self, mess, args):
        """Displays current server time"""
        return str(datetime.datetime.now())

    def bot_rot13( self, mess, args):
        """Returns passed arguments rot13'ed"""
        return args.encode('rot13')

    def bot_whoami( self, mess, args):
        """Tells you your username"""
        return mess.getFrom()
 
username = 'my-jabberid@jabberserver.example.org'
password = 'my-password'
bot = SystemInfoJabberBot(username,password)
bot.serve_forever()

Screenshot

Screenshot

Related projects

Yoan Blanc has done a similiar project using Python and the Twisted framework: A IM bot as an user interface (kind of).

Projects using python-jabberbot

Saturday, July 12th 2008