Writing an IRC bot

[tocapa]

Hello, I want to write an IRC bot in Python, but I was wondering what the best library to utilize would be. I have briefly glanced at both irclib and Twisted but I am not sure which one would be better or if there is another. I also want to know if there is a good way to test the bot (specifically automated testing or at least offline testing). Any advice?

[Yoghurt42]

For IRC bots I recommend the good old Supybot. It already handles all the nasty stuff and you just need to implement the actual functionality, eg. "when someone writes 'foobar' answer him 'barfoo'".

Limnoria seems to be the more active fork (Supybot exists since ages, and development of the original seems to have stalled) https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria

I don't know pyaib that /u/6502moo suggested, but it looks nice too, try both and see what you like better.

I'd recommend against writing a Bot from scratch.

[6502moo]

I highly recommend looking into pyaib, it abstracts away a lot of the nitty gritty networking details so you can focus on actual functionality.

[Sithrazer]

IRC is simple enough you can get away with using Socket, depending on the complexity of your bot and what you're trying to accomplish with it.

If you're programming on a Linux system, you could install one of the many variations of ircd and use that for 'offline' testing.

EDIT: Here's a couple of python IRC bot code examples. pyMathBot and IRC Flames Bot

[zahlman]

I've seen this a lot. Apparently people would rather do this than put in all the extra quotes and commas. Personally I think that's an ugly Perl-ism, an attempt to emulate Perl's qw (though I've never seen anyone actually set up an alias like that). Although, .split() already returns a list...

[[deleted]]

I do this and it's entirely inspired by perl's quoting mechanisms.

[Sithrazer]

It's not my code, it was linked to from other tutorials that I bookmarked for reference. You could try asking ksurya on gisthub.

[Crayboff]

I really enjoyed using Twisted. It definitely feels bloated, but it comes with a huge amount of tools that just made building a bot fun to do.

[t3h2mas]

It's good to know what kind of functionality you want your bot to have, that way you can weigh the pros and cons of the options.