Alebot per se provides near to no functionality. It will merely connect to the server, but won’t even initiate the irc auth according to IRC. It also will not send ping/pongs or anything else.
As the bot is pretty useless without this functionality though, there are some default plugins provided that will do all this quite necessary stuff for you and provide additional functionality that might be expected of an irc bot.
This is the plugin that supplies absolute minimum functionality. In it are both the hook for ping/pong events and it initiate the irc auth.
Do not disable it or your bot won’t do anything at all.
Additionally this module supplies some helper hooks that don’t do anything but can be subclassed to use to write plugins easier. Check the api documentation for more details.
The auth module provides capabilites for basic administrator management and authentication. It exposes a few commands to channels and privates.
You can use commands in the following format in IRC to access the functionality:
<nick of the bot>: admin <list>
<nick of the bot>: admin <add> <nick>
<nick of the bot>: admin <remove/delete> <nick>
To list currently configured admins, add a new admin or remove an admin.
This plugin provides some bot wide functionality to administrators. It thus requires the auth plugin. If you are configured as an administrator you can use one of the following commands:
<nick of the bot>: reload
<nick of the bot>: save
If you reload all plugins will be reloaded and eventual changes in source code and config will be accounted for. If you save the current in bot state of the config file will be written to disk.
The channels module will make the bot join the channels specified in the config upon successful irc auth.
The channels should be configured as a list of strings in the channels setting in the config file, i.e.:
{"channels": ["#channel1", "#channel2"]}
Shortlink is the only plugin that will not be loaded by default. This is due to the fact that it requires the requests module which I refuse to make a hard dependency just for this. You can enable it by installing the module. It will automatically shorten all urls longer than 50 chars using the google shortener. This will be done in the background so that the shortening does not block the bot itself.
You can configure the minimum required length of a link to shorten in the config file using the shortlink key:
{"shortlink": {"length": 30}}