Nanobot code help

Writing plugins for nanobot

If you cannot find a plugin with the functionality you need you may decide you want to write a plugin yourself.

The demo plugin

By far the best place to start is with the demo plugin. It has a short description and example for every special function and examples of some common constructions you may use when writing your own plugin. Besides that hand full of special functions it's just plain Ruby.

Global objects

There are a few global objects that a plugin gets access to when it's loaded. There are defined in the initialize function. We will from now on be describing functions as follows:

function(): name of a function so in ruby this would be 'def function'

argument: required argument to a function.

<argument>: optional argument to a function.

arg1|arg2: A specific set of options that are accepted. The function expects either 'arg1' or 'arg2' but not both or neither.

<arg1|arg2>: A specific set of options that are accepted. Unlike the previous, the function may also be called without any arguments. When called without arguments it will return the current value.

@status

This object contains most of the runtime state of the bot. Functions exist to interact with the status objects:

output( <0|1> ): Enable or disable output (-q option on the commandline)

colour( <0|1> ): Enable or disable colour in console output (-c option on the commandline)

debug( <0|1|2|3> ): Controls the debug level (-d option on the commandline)

login( <0|1> ): Switch so the bot knows if it's past it's login sequence. (Ident with nickserv and wait for ping if configured to do so.) Normally not something you want to manipulate yourself

threads( <0|1> ): Controls if threading is enabled. Not something you'd want to normally change at runtime. Things may break horribly if you do. (-t/-nt options on the commandline)

tabcomplete( <0|1> ): Enable or disable tab completion on the console

ssl( <0|1> ): Control use of SSL on connect. No reason to ever change this after you've connected. (-s option on the commandline)

console( <0|1> ): Enable or disable the interactive console (-n option on the commandline)

reconnect( <0|1> ): Control if we should attempt to reconnect automatically if the connection to the IRC server is lost.

autoload( <0|1> ): Status bit to see if we've completed the autoload on startup. No reason to change this yourself.

showconfig( <0|1> ): Used to check if the -p option is given on the commandline. Does nothing after startup.

plugins( <plugin array> ): Used to set or retrieve or set the whole list of plugins references. Not something you'd normally want to get and certainly not something you'd want to set yourself.

addplugin( plugin_name, plugin_object ): Add a plugin to the plugins list. Not something you need unless you're loading in ruby objects yourself.

delplugin( plugin_name ): Removes a plugin from the list of active plugins. Normally only done by the !unload command.

checkplugin( plugin_name ): Check if a plugin by that name is loaded.

getplugin( plugin_name ): Retrieve the reference to a plugin so we can execute it's functions.

startup(): Returns the time object of when the bot was started.

uptime( <current_time_object>, <old_time_object> ): Returns a human readable string of how much time is between the two time objects. The first defaults to Time.now the second defaults to the bots startup time.

giveconfig( config_object ): Set the config object used by the status object. Normally done by the bot on startup after the config is parsed.

getBaseComplete(): Returns a list of the built in functions and loaded plugin names. Used by the tab-complete functionality of the interactive console.

getPluginComplete( plugin_name ): Returns a list of a plugins' functions . Used by the tab-complete functionality of the interactive console.