Setup

The bot stores its data in a “working directory”, including its config file and databases. This is also the location where you will place custom IRC commands and bot tasks, which will be explained later. It doesn’t matter where this directory is, as long as the bot can write to it.

Start the bot with earwigbot path/to/working/dir, or just earwigbot if the working directory is the current directory. It will notice that no config.yml file exists and take you through the setup process.

There is currently no way to edit the config.yml file from within the bot after it has been created, but YAML is a very straightforward format, so you should be able to make any necessary changes yourself. Check out the explanation of YAML on Wikipedia for help.

After setup, the bot will start. This means it will connect to the IRC servers it has been configured for, schedule bot tasks to run at specific times, and then wait for instructions (as commands on IRC). For a list of commands, say “!help” (commands are messages prefixed with an exclamation mark).

You can stop the bot at any time with Control-c, same as you stop a normal Python program, and it will try to exit safely. You can also use the “!quit” command on IRC.