Special methods and catching events

This page is a non-exhaustive list of special plugin method names and events catchable via those methods (other events include configuration hooks and HTTP server callbacks)

All methods here are defined in supybot-callbacks-plugin. You may override them if you need, but make sure you call the parent’s one unless you actually don’t want to do it.

In case multiple plugins implement the same special methods, the order they are called depends on the callAfter and callBefore (lists of plugin names) attributes of the plugins, if they are set.

Loading and unloading

The __init__ method gets called with an Irc object as a parameter when a plugin is loaded (or has just been reloaded). Make sure you always call the parent’s __init__.

When a plugin is unloaded (or is to be reloaded), the die method is called (with no parameter). Also make sure you always call the parent’s die.

Commands and numerics

You can catch commands directly with “do-methods”: when the bot receives a PRIVMSG, all doPrivmsg methods are called; when it gets a 437 message, all do437 methods are called, etc.

Those command take two commands: an Irc object and a IrcMsg object.

To get a list of all possible messages, check IRC specifications.

Filters

The inFilter and outFilter methods allow you to “intercept” messages between the bot and the network and to alter them.

inFilter gets messages just after they are parsed from network; and its return value is fed to the bot. outFilter does the opposite: it get any message the bot is about the send, and returns a message (which may be the same) that will be sent instead.

Commands handling

Command dispatching

Note

I wrote this subsection with the little knowledge I have of the commands handling (all I know comes from hacks I made to write the Aka plugin), so keep in mind some informations might be wrong. As for all the documentation, feel free to contact me to correct/enhance it.

  • isCommandMethod takes a command name as a string (which may contain spaces) and returns a boolean telling if the plugin provides this command.
  • listCommands returns a list of command names as strings (which may contain spaces)
  • getCommand takes a potential command name as a list of strings, and returns a truncated list corresponding to the name of a command provided by the plugin. If no command match, it returns an empty list.
  • getCommandMethod takes a command name as a list of strings and returns the corresponding method/function.
  • callCommand gets a command name as a list of strings, an irc object, an msg object, and extra arguments (with *args and **kwargs), calls getCommandMethod to get the command method, and calls it with the arguments. It also calls the functions in pre_command_callback.

Pre-command-call callbacks

Note

Until stock Supybot and Gribble merge this feature, this section only applies to Limnoria

If you want a function of your plugin to be called before every command call, you can add it to the pre_command_callback attribute of your plugin (actually, it is a static class attribute, so make sure you add it to the list and don’t touch other items of the list).

At every command call, all callbacks are called, and if any of them returns True, the command is not called.

Regular expression triggered events

The supybot.callbacks.PluginRegexp class provides some utilities for creating plugins that act on regular expression matching.