CloudBot is a Python IRC bot very heavily based on Skybot by rmmh.

• Easy to use wrapper
• Intuitive configuration
• Fully controlled from IRC
• Fully compatable with existing skybot plugins
• Easily extendable
  • Thorough documentation
  • Cross-platform
• Muti-threaded, efficient
  • Automatic reloading
  • Little boilerplate

Get CloudBot at git.io/getcloudbotirc.

Unzip the resulting file, and continue to read this document.

Before you can run the bot, you need to install a few Python modules. These are lXML and BeautifulSoup. These can be installed with PIP (The Python package manager). If you use Windows and dont want to set up pip, you can also find exe installers on the internet:

pip install lxml

pip install beautifulsoup

On Debian based systems, you can get pip with

apt-get install pip

For .spell to work, we also need a library called Enchant. On Debian based systems, install it with:

apt-get install python-enchant

In addition, for .whois to work optimally, you must have whois installed. Again, on Debian based systems, install it with:

apt-get install whois

If you are a user of another Linux disto, use your package manager to install the dependencies, or, for other operating systems, use Google to locate source packages you can install.

Once you have installed the required dependencies, there are two ways you can run the bot:

The launcher will start the bot as a background process, and allow the bot to close and restart itself. This is only supported on unix-like machines (not Windows).

For the launcher to work properly, install screen, or daemon (daemon is recommended) :

apt-get install screen

apt-get install daemon

Once you have installed either screen or daemon, run the start command:

./cloudbot start

It will generate a default config for you. Once you have edited the config, run it again with the same command:

./cloudbot start

This will start up your bot as a background process. To stop it, use ./cloudbot stop. (Config docs at the wiki)

To manually run the bot and get debug output, run it with:

python bot.py

On Windows you can usually just double-click the bot.py file to start the bot, as long as you have Python installed correctly.

(note that running it without the launcher will break the restart and stop commands)

To configure your CloudBot, visit the Config Wiki Page.

To write your own plugins, visit the Plugin Wiki Page.

More at the Wiki Main Page.

The developers reside in #CloudBot on EsperNet and would be glad to help you.

If you think you have found a bug/have a idea/suggestion, please open a issue here on Github.

The developers of CloudBot run two CloudBots on Espernet.

They can both be found in [#CloudBot](irc://irc.esper.net/cloudbot "Connect via IRC to #CloudBot on irc.esper.net).

mau5bot is the stable bot, and runs on the latest release version of CloudBot. (mau5bot is running on Ubuntu Server Oneric Ocelot/11.10 with Python 2.7.2)

neerbot is the unstable bot, and runs on the latest development² version of CloudBot. (neerbot is running on Debian Wheezy/Testing with Python 2.7.2)

CloudBot runs on Python 2.7.x. It is developed on Debian Wheezy/Testing and Ubuntu 11.10 with Python 2.7.2.

It requires Python modules lXML, BeautifulSoup, Enchant, psutil, and HTTPlib2.

The programs screen or daemon are recomended for the wrapper to run optimaly.

Windows users: Windows compatibility with the wrapper and some plugins is broken (such as the ping), but we do intend to add it.³

CloudBot is licensed under the GPL v3 license. The terms are as follows.

CloudBot/DEV

Copyright © 2011 ClouDev - <[cloudev.github.com](http://cloudev.github.com)>

CloudBot is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

CloudBot is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with CloudBot.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

¹ if you prefer to run the bot with a custom backend/run it manually, or are on Windows, run the bot with ./bot.py

² or whatever version neersighted is currently hacking on

³ eventually