A generalized event/plugin framework and a set of plugins for an IRC bot, using Twisted, by Andrew Brown.

Okay so this isn't anything special or ground breaking, it was just for fun. Despite being intended for IRC, this is a general framework that could find use in other applications. (well, not that easily tbh. you could use this for non-irc purposes, but all the plugins right now are designed around the IRC plugin, so you'd need a whole new set of plugins.)

• All functionality is implemented as plugins except for a mechanism for loading plugins and a mechanism for communication between plugins
• Online loading and reloading of plugins
• Features a generalized event and request framework for communication among plugins
• Full unicode support
• Includes a command system with Nickserv-based identification, a robust-ish authentication/permission system, built-in !help, and regular expression-based argument parsing
• Completely single-threaded with cooperative coroutines using Twisted deferreds. No locks or unexpected state mutations that come with threads!
• Persistent data / config files for plugins
• Automatically reconnects when disconnected
• Well-commented code and clear, well-defined separation between layers of abstraction. (well, it could always be better, but I think it's pretty good)

To run the bot you need Python 2.7. You also need Twisted installed.

Additionally, the following third party libraries are needed for select plugins. You can pip install most of these.

• For the irc plugin, you need the pyOpenSSL package.
• For the icecast plugin, you need the beautifulsoup4 package.
• Far the admin plugin, you need the parsedatetime package. The version in PYPI doesn't support python 3, but the latest in SVN does: http://parsedatetime.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
• For the useful.URLShortener plugin you need the python-googl package.

Usage:

python main.py <config dir>

Ensure that the abbott package is on the python path. If the directory does not exist, it will be created. The config dir is where the configuration is stored, one json file per plugin, plus an overall config.json. The first time you run the bot, it will ask a few questions and configure itself with the minimal set of plugins and configuration it needs to launch and connect to an IRC server.

Look through the plugins offered by various modules in the plugins directory. Ask the bot in a direct message for help with the 'help' command. Load new plugins with the 'plugin load <modulename>.<pluginname>' command. Set permissions with the 'permission add <nickserv account> <permission> [channel]' command. See the definition of the commands in the code for what permission they require.

If you want to understand the code, I suggest you start reading in transport.py. The docstring and transport object in there describe the plugin communication method, which is most all of the "framework" (the rest being the mechanism for loading plugins. After that all that's left is the plugins themselves!)

Then start reading in pluginbase.py to understand the interfaces provided to plugins. Don't worry about command.py because that contains a touch of black magic that may be hard to understand; it's better to understand command plugins by looking at examples and maybe the docstrings in command.py.

You'll also want to read up on twisted deferred objects if you aren't familiar; they are used extensively all throughout the framework. Also make sure you know what the defer.inlineCallbacks decorator does and how to use it.

After that, start reading the plugins or write your own. I like to think my code is pretty well commented and documented, but you still need to be able to read and write code to understand it. I love answering questions and explaining my work so please feel free to email me or find me on IRC.