Servus, an IRC bot This file documents (briefly) the development and usage of the Servus bot from the perspective of the bot operator. Servus.html contains the user-facing documentation. * Invocation * "python acrobat.py Servus-chiark" is the basic usage. For long-running instances, you probably want to run using nohup (and redirecting stdout somewhere sensible). Equally, if you want to change the owner, server, channel, nickname and the like, you can edit Servus-chiark.py or append the relevant overrides to the command line, e.g.: python acrobat.py Servus-chiark nickname=testbot channel=\#test owner=MyNick * Known Issues * - "define" is currently broken, because google have buggered around with the results to a define: query. There are at least two output formats now, too: cf "define:zealot" and "define:VFS", for examples of each. - Servus doesn't see things people emit with /me. This is a problem for the URL-tracking code, and needs fixing. - Servus will only emit ASCII. It's not clear to me that this is wrong, but if we move to everyone having UTF8-capable irc clients, it would be nice to fix it such that it emits ASCII when it can and UTF8 otherwise - Servus can only deal with being on a single channel at once * Dependencies * Servus depends on some things that aren't in standard python (or included in its source). You can install them system-wide or add the --prefix command to setup.py install (and make sure PYTHONPATH is sensible). i) oauth2 https://github.com/simplegeo/python-oauth2 in debian stable as python-oauth2 ii) httplib2 http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/ in debian oldstable+ as python-httplib2 iii) simplejson http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/simplejson or in standard python2.6 and above iv) python-twitter (which requires all of the above) http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/