Errbot

Errbot is a chatbot. It allows you to start scripts interactively from your chatrooms for any reason: random humour, chatops, starting a build, monitoring commits, triggering alerts...

It is written and easily extensible in Python.

Errbot is available as open-source software and released under the GPL v3 license.

Features

Chat servers support

Built-in

• IRC support
• Hipchat support
• Slack support
• Telegram support
• XMPP support

With add-ons

• CampFire (See instructions)
• Cisco Spark (See instructions)
• Discord (See instructions)
• Gitter support (See instructions)
• Matrix (See instructions)
• Mattermost (See instructions)
• Skype (See instructions)
• TOX (See instructions)
• VK (See instructions)
• Zulip (See instructions)

Administration

After the initial installation and security setup, Errbot can be administered by just chatting to the bot (chatops).

• install/uninstall/update/enable/disable private or public plugins hosted on git
• plugins can be configured from chat
• direct the bot to join/leave Multi User Chatrooms (MUC)
• Security: ACL control feature (admin/user rights per command)
• backup: an integrated command !backup creates a full export of persisted data.
• logs: can be inspected from chat or streamed to Sentry.

Developer features

• Very easy to extend in Python! (see below)
• Presetup storage for every plugin i.e. self['foo'] = 'bar' persists the value.
• Conversation flows to track conversation states from users.
• Webhook callbacks support
• supports markdown extras formatting with tables, embedded images, links etc.
• configuration helper to allow your plugin to be configured by chat
• Graphical and text development/debug consoles
• Self-documenting: your docstrings become help automatically
• subcommands and various arg parsing options are available (re, command line type)
• polling support: your can setup a plugin to periodically do something
• end to end test backend
• card rendering under Slack and Hipchat.

Community and support

If you have:

• a quick question feel free to join us on chat at errbotio/errbot on Gitter.
• a plugin development question please use Stackoverflow with the tags errbot and python.
• a bug to report or a feature request, please use our GitHub project page.

For more general discussion and announcements, you can join us on google plus community. You can also ping us on Twitter with the hashtag #errbot.

Installation

Prerequisites

Errbot runs under Python 3.3+ on Linux, Windows and Mac. For some chatting systems you'll need a key or a login for your bot to access it. Note: Python 2 support is still available in errbot-4.2.x, but it is going away.

Quickstart

We recommend to setup a virtualenv.

1. Install errbot from pip
2. Make a directory somewhere (here called errbot) to host Errbot's data files
3. Initialize the directory
4. Try out Errbot in text mode

$ pip install errbot
$ mkdir errbot; cd errbot
$ errbot --init
$ errbot

It will show you a prompt >>> so you can talk to your bot directly! Try !help to get started.

Adding support for a chat system

For the built-ins, just use one of those options slack, hipchap, telegram, IRC, XMPP with pip, you can still do it after the initial installation to add the missing support for example :

$ pip install "errbot[slack]"

For the external ones (Skype, Gitter, Discord etc ...), please follow their respective github pages for instructions.

Configuration

In order to configure Errbot to connect to one of those chat systems you'll need to tweak the config.py file generated by errbot --init.

To help you, we have a documented template available here: config-template.py.

Note: even if you changed the BACKEND from the configuration, you can still use errbot -T and errbot -G to test out your instance locally (in text and graphic mode respectively).

Starting Errbot as a daemon

If all that worked, you can now use the -d (or --daemon) parameter to run it in a detached mode:

errbot --daemon

Interacting with the Bot

After starting Errbot, you should add the bot to your buddy list if you haven't already. You'll need to invite the bot explicitly to chatrooms on some chat systems too. You can now send commands directly to the bot!

To get a list of all available commands, you can issue:

!help

If you just wish to know more about a specific command you can issue:

!help command

Managing plugins

You can administer the bot in a one-on-one chat if your handle is in the BOT_ADMINS list in config.py.

For example to keyword search in the public plugin repos you can issue:

!repos search jira

To install a plugin from this list, issue:

!repos install 

For example !repos install errbotio/err-imagebot.

Writing plugins

Writing your own plugins is extremely simple. errbot --init will have installed in the plugins subdirectory a plugin called err-example you can use as a base.

As an example, this is all it takes to create a "Hello, world!" plugin for Errbot:

from errbot import BotPlugin, botcmd

class Hello(BotPlugin):
    """Example 'Hello, world!' plugin for Errbot"""

    @botcmd
    def hello(self, msg, args):
        """Return the phrase "Hello, world!" to you"""
        return "Hello, world!"

This plugin will create the command "!hello" which, when issued, returns "Hello, world!" to you. For more info on everything you can do with plugins, see the plugin development guide.

Contribution to Errbot itself

Feel free to fork and propose changes on github

v5.2.0 (2018-04-04)

fixes:

• backup fix : SyntaxError: literal_eval on file with statements (thx Bruno Oliveira)
• plugin_manager: skip plugins not in CORE_PLUGIN entirely (thx Dylan Page)
• repository search fix (thx Sijis)
• Text: mentions in the Text backend (thx Sijis)
• Text: double @ in replies (thx Sijis)
• Slack: Support breaking messages body attachment
• Slack: Add channelname to Slackroom (thx Davis Garana Pena)

features:

• Enable split arguments on room_join so you can use " (thx Robert Honig)
• Add support for specifying a custom log formatter (Thx Oz Linden)
• Add Sentry transport support (thx Dylan Page)
• File transfert support (send_stream_request) on the Hipchat backend (thx Brad Payne)
• Show user where they are in a flow (thx Elijah Roberts)
• Help commands are sorted alphabetically (thx Fabian Chong)
• Proxy support for Slack (thx deferato)

v5.1.3 (2017-10-15)

fixes:

• Default --init config is now compatible with Text backend requirements.
• Windows: Config directories as raw string (Thx defAnfaenger)
• Windows: Repo Manager first time update (Thx Jake Shadle)
• Slack: fix Slack identities to be hashable
• Hipchat: fix HicpChat Server XMPP namespace (Thx Antti Palsola)
• Hipchat: more aggressive cashing of user list to avoid API quota exceeds (thx Roman)

v5.1.2 (2017-08-26)

fixes:

• Text: BOT_IDENTITY to stay optional in config.py
• Hipchat: send_card fix for room name lookup (thx Jason Kincl)
• Hipchat: ACL in rooms

v5.1.1 (2017-08-12)

fixes:

• allows spaces in BOT_PREFIX.
• Text: ACLs were not working (@user vs user inconsistency).

v5.1.0 (2017-07-24)

fixes:

• allow webhook receivers on / (tx Robin Gloster)
• force utf-8 to release changes (thx Robert Krambovitis)
• don't generate an errbot section if no version is specified in plugin gen (thx Meet Mangukiya)
• callback on all unknown commands filters
• user friendly message when a room is not found
• webhook with no uri but kwargs now work as intended
• Slack: support for Enterprise Grid (thx Jasper)
• Hipchat: fix room str repr. (thx Roman)
• XMPP: fix for MUC users with @ in their names (thx Joon Guillen)
• certificate generation was failing under some conditions

features:

• Support for threaded messages (Slack initially but API is done for other backends to use)
• Text: now the text backend can emulate an inroom/inperson or asuser/asadmin behavior
• Text: autocomplete of command is now supported
• Text: multiline messages are now supported
• start_poller can now be restricted to a number of execution (thx Marek Suppa)
• recurse_check_structure back to public API (thx Alex Sheluchin)
• better flow status (thx lijah Roberts)
• !about returns a git tag instead of just 9.9.9 as version for a git checkout. (thx Sven)
• admin notifications can be set up to a set of users (thx Sijis Aviles)
• logs can be colorized with drak, light or nocolor as preference.

v5.0.1 (2017-05-08)

hotfixes for v5.0.0.

fixes: - fix crash for SUPPRESS_CMD_NOT_FOUND=True (thx Romuald Texier-Marcadé!)

breaking / API cleanups: - Missed patch for 5.0.0: now the name of a plugin is defined by its name in .plug and not its class name.

v5.0.0 (2017-04-23)

features:

• Add support for cascaded subcommands (cmd_sub1_sub2_sub3) (thx Jeremiah Lowin)
• You can now use symbolic links for your plugins
• Telegram: send_stream_request support added (thx Alexandre Manhaes Savio)
• Callback to unhandled messages (thx tamarin)
• flows: New option to disable the next step hint (thx Aviv Laufer)
• IRC: Added Notice support (bot can listen to them)
• Slack: Original slack event message is attached to Message (Thx Bryan Shelton)
• Slack: Added reaction support and Message.extras['url'] (Thx Tomer Chachamu)
• Text backend: readline support (thx Robert Coup)
• Test backend: stream requests support (thx Thomas Lee)

fixes:

• When a templated cmd crashes, it was crashing in the handling of the error.
• Slack: no more crash if a message only contains attachments
• Slack: fix for some corner case links (Thx Tomer Chachamu)
• Slack: fixed LRU for better performance on large teams
• Slack: fix for undefined key 'username' when the bot doesn't have one (thx Octavio Antonelli)

other:

• Tests: use conftest module to specify testbot fixture location (thx Pavel Savchenko)
• Python 3.6.x added to travis.
• Ported the yield tests to pytest 4.0
• Removed a deprecated dependency for the threadpool, now uses the standard one (thx Muri Nicanor)

breaking / API cleanups:

• removed deprecated presence attributes (nick and occupant)
• removed deprecated type from messages.
• utils.ValidationException has moved to errbot.ValidationException and is fully part of the API.
• {utils, errbot}.get_class_that_defined_method is now _bot.get_plugin_class_from_method
• utils.utf8 has been removed, it was a leftover for python 2 compat.
• utils.compat_str has been removed, it was a vestige for python 2 too.

v4.3.7 (2017-02-08)

fixes:

• slack: compatibility with slackclient > 1.0.5.
• render test fix (thx Sandeep Shantharam)

v4.3.6 (2017-01-28)

fixes:

• regression with Markdown 2.6.8.

v4.3.5 (2016-12-21)

fixes:

• slack: compatibility with slackclient > 1.0.2
• slack: block on reads on RTM (better response time) (Thx Tomer Chachamu)
• slack: fix link names (")
• slack: ignore channel_topic messages (thx Mikhail Sobolev)
• slack: Match ACLs for bots on integration ID
• slack: Process messages from webhook users
• slack: don't crash when unable to look up alternate prefix
• slack: trm_read refactoring (thx Chris Niemira)
• telegram: fix telegram ID test against ACLs
• telegram: ID as strings intead of ints (thx Pmoranga)
• fixed path to the config template in the startup error message (Thx Ondrej Skopek)

v4.3.4 (2016-10-05)

features:

• Slack: Stream (files) uploads are now supported
• Hipchat: Supports for self-signed server certificates.

fixes:

• Card emulation support for links (Thx Robin Gloster)
• IRC: Character limits fix (Thx lqaz)
• Dependency check fix.

v4.3.3 (2016-09-09)

fixes:

• err references leftovers
• requirements.txt is now standard (you can use git+https:// for example)

v4.3.2 (2016-09-04)

hotfix:

• removed the hard dependency on pytest for the Text backend

v4.3.1 (2016-09-03)

features:

• now the threadpool is of size 10 by default and added a configuration.

fixes:

• fixed imporlib/use pip as process (#835) (thx Raphael Wouters)
• if pip is not found, don't crash errbot
• build_identifier to send message to IRC channels (thx mr Shu)

v4.3.0 (2016-08-10)

v4.3 features

• DependsOn: entry in .plug and self.get_plugin(...) allowing you to make a plugin dependent from another.
• New entry in config.py: PLUGINS_CALLBACK_ORDER allows you to force a callback order on your installed plugins.
• Flows can be shared by a room if you build the flow with FlowRoot(room_flow=True) (thx Tobias Wilken)
• New construct for persistence: with self.mutable(key) as value: that allows you to change by side effect value without bothering to save value back.

v4.3 Miscellaneous changes

• This version work only on Python 3.4+ (see 4.2 announcement)
• Presence.nick is deprecated, simply use presence.identifier.nick instead.
• Slack: Bot identity is automatically added to BOT_ALT_PREFIXES
• The version checker now reports your Python version to be sure to not upgrade Python 2 users to 4.3
• Moved testing to Tox. We used to use a custom script, this improves a lot the local testing setup etc. (Thx Pedro Rodrigues)

v4.3 fixes

• IRC: fixed IRC_ACL_PATTERN
• Slack: Mention callback improvements (Thx Ash Caire)
• Encoding error report was inconsistent with the value checked (Thx Steve Jarvis)
• core: better support for all the types of virtualenvs (Thx Raphael Wouters)

v4.2.2 (2016-06-24)

fixes:

• send_templated fix
• CHATROOM_RELAY fix
• Blacklisting feedback message corrected

v4.2.1 (2016-06-10)

Hotfix

• packaging failure under python2
• better README

v4.2.0 (2016-06-10)

v4.2 Announcement

• Bye bye Python 2 ! This 4.2 branch will be the last to support Python 2. We will maintain bug fixes on it for at least the end of 2016 so you can transition nicely, but please start now !

  Python 3 has been released 8 years ago, now all the major distributions finally have it available, the ecosystem has moved on too. This was not the case at all when we started to port Errbot to Python 3.

  This will clean up a lot of code with ugly if PY2, unicode hacks, 3to2 reverse hacks all over the place and packaging tricks. But most of all it will finally unite the Errbot ecosystem under one language and open up new possibilities as we refrained from using py3 only features.

• A clarification on Errbot's license has been accepted. The contributors never intended to have the GPL licence be enforced for external plugins. Even if it was not clear it would apply, our new licence exception makes sure it isn't. Big big thanks for the amazing turnout on this one !

v4.2 New features

• Errbot initial installation. The initial installation has been drastically simplified:

  $ pip install errbot
  $ mkdir errbot; cd errbot
  $ errbot --init
  $ errbot -T
  >>>     <- You are game !!
  

  Not only that but it also install a development directory in there so it now takes only seconds to have an Errbot development environment.

• Part of this change, we also made most of the config.py entries with sane defaults, a lot of those settings were not even relevant for most users.

• cards are now supported on the graphic backend with a nice rendering (errbot -G)

• Hipchat: mentions are now supported.

v4.2 Miscellaneous changes

• Documentation improvements
• Reorganization and rename of the startup files. Those were historically the first ones to be created and their meaning drifted over the years. We had err.py, main.py and errBot.py, it was really not clear what were their functions and why one has been violating the python module naming convention for so long 😃 They are now bootstrap.py (everything about configuring errbot), cli.py (everything about the errbot command line) and finally core.py (everything about the commands, and dispatching etc...).
• setup.py cleanup. The hacks in there were incorrect.

v4.2 fixes

• core: excpetion formatting was failing on some plugin load failures.
• core: When replacing the prefix ! from the doctrings only real commands get replaced (thx Raphael Boidol)
• core: empty lines on plugins requirements.txt does crash errbot anymore
• core: Better error message in case of malformed .plug file
• Text: fix on build_identifier (thx Pawet Adamcak)
• Slack: several fixes for identifiers parsing, the backend is fully compliant with Errbot's contract now (thx Raphael Boidol and Samuel Loretan)
• Hipchat: fix on room occupants (thx Roman Forkosh)
• Hipchat: fix for organizations with more than 100 rooms. (thx Naman Bharadwaj)
• Hipchat: fixed a crash on build_identifier

v4.1.3 (2016-05-10)

hotfixes:

• Slack: regression on build_identifier
• Hipchat: regression on build_identifier (query for room is not supported)

v4.1.2 (2016-05-10)

fixes:

• cards for hipchat and slack were not merged.

v4.1.1 (2016-05-09)

fixes:

• Python 2.7 conversion error on err.py.

v4.1.0 (2016-05-09)

v4.1 features

• Conversation flows: Errbot can now keep track of conversations with its users and automate part of the interactions in a state machine manageable from chat. see the flows documentation for more information.
• Cards API: Various backends have a "canned" type of formatted response. We now support that for a better native integration with Slack and Hipchat.
• Dynamic Plugins API: Errbot has now an official API to build plugins at runtime (on the fly). see the dynamic plugins doc
• Storage command line interface: It is now possible to provision any persistent setting from the command line. It is helpful if you want to automate end to end the deployment of your chatbot. see provisioning doc

v4.1 Miscellaneous changes

• Now if no [python] section is set in the .plug file, we assume Python 3 instead of Python 2.
• Slack: identifier.person now gives its username instead of slack id
• IRC: Topic change callback fixed. Thx Ezequiel Brizuela.
• Text/Test: Makes the identifier behave more like a real backend.
• Text: new TEXT_DEMO_MODE that removes the logs once the chat is started: it is made for presentations / demos.
• XMPP: build_identifier can now resolve a Room (it will eventually be available on other backends)
• Graphic Test backend: renders way better the chat, TEXT_DEMO_MODE makes it full screen for your presentations.
• ACLs: We now allow a simple string as an entry with only one element.
• Unit Tests are now all pure py.test instead of a mix of (py.test, nose and unittest)

v4.1 fixed

• Better resillience on concurrent modifications of the commands structures.
• Allow multiline table cells. Thx Ilya Figotin.
• Plugin template was incorrectly showing how to check config. Thx Christian Weiske.
• Slack: DIVERT_TO_PRIVATE fix.
• Plugin Activate was not reporting correctly some errors.
• tar.gz packaged plugins are working again.

v4.0.3 (2016-03-17)

fixes:

• XMPP backend compatibility with python 2.7
• Telegram startup error
• daemonize regression
• UTF-8 detection

v4.0.2 (2016-03-15)

hotfixes:

• configparser needs to be pinned to a 3.5.0b2 beta
• Hipchat regression on Identifiers
• Slack: avoid URI expansion.

v4.0.1 (2016-03-14)

hotfixes:

• v4 doesn't migrate plugin repos entries from v3.
• py2 compatibility.

v4.0.0 (2016-03-13)

This is the next major release of errbot with significant changes under the hood.

v4.0 New features

• Storage is now implemented as a plugin as well, similar to command plugins and backends. This means you can now select different storage implementations or even write your own.

The following storage backends are currently available:

> - The traditional Python shelf > storage. > - In-memory storage for tests or ephemeral storage. > - SQL storage which > supports relational databases such as MySQL, Postgres, Redshift > etc. > - Firebase > storage for the > Google Firebase DB. > - Redis storage > (thanks Sijis Aviles!) which uses the Redis in-memory data > structure store.

• Unix-style glob support in BOT_ADMINS and ACCESS_CONTROLS (see the updated config-template.py for documentation).
• The ability to apply ACLs to all commands exposed by a plugin (see the updated config-template.py for documentation).
• The mention_callcack() on IRC (mr. Shu).
• A new (externally maintained) Skype backend.
• The ability to disable core plugins (such as !help, !status, etc) from loading (see CORE_PLUGINS in the updated config-template.py).
• Added a --new-plugin flag to errbot which can create an emply plugin skeleton for you.
• IPv6 configuration support on IRC (Mike Burke)
• More flexible access controls on IRC based on nickmasks (in part thanks to Marcus Carlsson). IRC users, see the new IRC_ACL_PATTERN in config-template.py.
• A new callback_mention() for plugins (not available on all backends).
• Admins are now notified about plugin startup errors which happen during bot startup
• The repos listed by the !repos command are now fetched from a public index and can be queried with !repos query [keyword]. Additionally, it is now possible to add your own index(es) to this list as well in case you wish to maintain a private index (special thanks to Sijis Aviles for the initial proof-of-concept implementation).

v4.0 fixed

• IRC backend no longer crashes on invalid UTF-8 characters but instead replaces them (mr. Shu).
• Fixed joining password-protected rooms (Mikko Lehto)
• Compatibility to API changes introduced in slackclient-1.0.0 (used by the Slack backend).
• Corrected room joining on IRC (Ezequiel Hector Brizuela).
• Fixed "team_join event handler raised an exception" on Slack.
• Fixed DIVERT_TO_PRIVATE on HipChat.
• Fixed DIVERT_TO_PRIVATE on Slack.
• Fixed GROUPCHAT_NICK_PREFIXED not prefixing the user on regular commands.
• Fixed HIDE_RESTRICTED_ACCESS from accidentally sending messages when issuing !help.
• Fixed DIVERT_TO_PRIVATE on IRC.
• Fixed markdown rendering breaking with GROUPCHAT_NICK_PREFIXED enabled.
• Fixed AttributeError with AUTOINSTALL_DEPS enabled.
• IRC backend now cleanly disconnects from IRC servers instead of just cutting the connection.
• Text mode now displays the prompt beneath the log output
• Plugins which fail to install no longer remain behind, obstructing a new installation attempt

v4.0 Breaking changes

• The underlying implementation of Identifiers has been drastically refactored to be more clear and correct. This makes it a lot easier to construct Identifiers and send messages to specific people or rooms.
• The file format for --backup and --restore has changed between 3.x and 4.0 On the v3.2 branch, backup can now backup using the new v4 format with !backupv4 to make it possible to use with --restore on errbot 4.0.

A number of features which had previously been deprecated have now been removed. These include:

• configure_room and invite_in_room in XMPPBackend (use the equivalent functions on the XMPPRoom object instead)
• The --xmpp, --hipchat, --slack and --irc command-line options from errbot (set a proper BACKEND in config.py instead).

v 4.0 Miscellaneous changes

• Version information is now specified in plugin .plug files instead of in the Python class of the plugin.
• Updated !help output, more similar to Hubot's help output (James O'Beirne and Sijis Aviles).
• XHTML-IM output can now be enabled on XMPP again.
• New --version flag on errbot (mr. Shu).
• Made !log tail admin only (Nicolas Sebrecht).
• Made the version checker asynchronous, improving startup times.
• Optionally allow bot configuration from groupchat
• Message.type is now deprecated in favor of Message.is_direct and Message.is_group.
• Some bundled dependencies have been refactored out into external dependencies.
• Many improvements have been made to the documention, both in docstrings internally as well as the user guide on the website at .

Further info on identifier changes

• Person, RoomOccupant and Room are now all equal and can be used as-is to send a message to a person, a person in a Room or a Room itself.

The relationship is as follow:

For example: A Message sent from a room will have a RoomOccupant as frm and a Room as to.

This means that you can now do things like:

• self.send(msg.frm, "Message")
• self.send(self.query_room("#general"), "Hello everyone")