I created a chat bot for the Stack Exchange chat rooms.

The bot is open-source and the code is hosted on GitHub.

The bot is licensed under CPOL (The Code Project Open License) v1.02. You can find a copy of this license in LICENSE.htm.

Setup

The bot uses Python 2.7. Before you can use the bot, you need to install some dependencies such as ChatExchange and BeautifulSoup4. You can install them by running setup.sh.

You'll also need to copy template/ConfigTemplate.py to Config.py. You will also need to add some required configuration data in Config.py. The comments in that file tell you which values you can add and how to add them.

Running

When you run the bot, it will prompt you for necessary information that you have not provided in Config.py. If you wish to use a specific configuration, run the bot with the argument -c configuration_name. You can also use -s site_name, -r room_number, -e email_address and -p password. The last four items will always override data stored in a configuration, if set.

Logging

You can use logging on the bot. It is disabled by default, but you can enable it by un-commenting the self.setup_logging() line in Chatbot.py (in the main method).

Executing commands/posting messages using the command line

You can execute commands from the bot by providing input on the command line. $+command args will execute the command and post the result to the chat room, and $-command args will only post the result to the command line. If your input does not start with a $, the bot will post the given input to the chat room.

Commands in a chat room

Commands in a chat room are executed like >>command optional arguments. To get a list of all commands, run >>listcommands. To get help on a specific command, run >>help command.

Modules

You can extend the bot by adding your own modules containing commands, which you can group into meta-modules. See the templates in the templates/ folder for help on how to create a module. Thanks a lot to overactor for the idea and for a major part of the implementation!