LaZBot is a slack bot written in Python. It is designed to handle a lot of the heavy lifting and make plugin development easy. It uses decorators to tie into the large event system of the bot framework. All a plugin needs to do is decorate various handlers with the event they are tied to.

All you need to do is take the token for the slack user you wish to act as, copy the etc/config.json to the root, replacing the slack_token with the token you generated. Then you can run make start to run this (or add src to your PYTHONPATH and run bin/start).

Initially, there are only a few events tied into. This is a very much work in progress framework.

The listen event will take a string and a few optional keyword arguments including channel and regex. channel takes one or many channels and will only handle messages in those channels. regex marks the filter string as a "regex" string, which comes with some nice filters to ease string parsing (documented below).

The setup event will be run after the bot has connected to slack. It will provide an instance of the underlying slacker client object to allow for calls to the slack server.

Included are three example/helper plugins

The ext.py plugin provides some convenient handlers to help populate the user and channel lookup functionality and provides another (currently undocumented) filter to convert the slackified username for the current bot into @me for easier filters.

The about.py plugin provides a simple example of reading config variables and implementing a simple listener. It will just respond to @<bot_name>: about and respond with Hi, I am <bot_name>, a bot in development by @<configured_username>.

The admin.py plugin provides two administrative commands and some helper functions to enable the idea of "administrative" commands, i.e. commands that modify or perform actions that should have limited scope (killing the bot, making changes on the backend, etc).