Plugins

Plugins

A chat bot is meaningless unless you can extend/customize it to fit your own use cases.

To write a new plugin, simply create a function decorated by mattermost_bot.bot.respond_to or mattermost_bot.bot.listen_to:

  • A function decorated with respond_to is called when a message matching the pattern is sent to the bot (direct message or @botname in a channel/group chat)
  • A function decorated with listen_to is called when a message matching the pattern is sent on a channel/group chat (not directly sent to the bot)
import re

from mattermost_bot.bot import listen_to
from mattermost_bot.bot import respond_to


@respond_to('hi', re.IGNORECASE)
def hi(message):
    message.reply('I can understand hi or HI!')


@respond_to('I love you')
def love(message):
    message.reply('I love you too!')


@listen_to('Can someone help me?')
def help_me(message):
    # Message is replied to the sender (prefixed with @user)
    message.reply('Yes, I can!')

    # Message is sent on the channel
    # message.send('I can help everybody!')

To extract params from the message, you can use regular expression:

from mattermost_bot.bot import respond_to


@respond_to('Give me (.*)')
def give_me(message, something):
    message.reply('Here is %s' % something)

If you would like to have a command like ‘stats’ and ‘stats start_date end_date’, you can create reg ex like so:

from mattermost_bot.bot import respond_to
import re


@respond_to('stat$', re.IGNORECASE)
@respond_to('stat (.*) (.*)', re.IGNORECASE)
def stats(message, start_date=None, end_date=None):
    pass

And add the plugins module to PLUGINS list of mattermost_bot settings, e.g. mattermost_bot_settings.py:

PLUGINS = [
    'mattermost_bot.plugins',
    'devops.plugins',          # e.g. git submodule: domain:devops-plugins.git
    'programmers.plugins',     # e.g. python package: package_name.plugins
    'frontend.plugins',        # e.g. project tree: apps.bot.plugins
]

For example you can separate git repositories with plugins on your team.

Attachment Support

from mattermost_bot.bot import respond_to


@respond_to('webapi')
def webapi_reply(message):
    attachments = [{
        'fallback': 'Fallback text',
        'author_name': 'Author',
        'author_link': 'http://www.github.com',
        'text': 'Some text here ...',
        'color': '#59afe1'
    }]
    message.reply_webapi(
        'Attachments example', attachments,
        username='Mattermost-Bot',
        icon_url='https://goo.gl/OF4DBq',
    )
    # Optional: Send message to specified channel
    # message.send_webapi('', attachments, channel_id=message.channel)