Frequently Asked Questions#

How to contact us?#

You can contact us by joining the development and community channel on IRC:

  • connect to the libera.chat network

  • and join the #sopel channel

We talk about the bot’s development, and we answer questions from bot owners & plugin authors as much as we can. We try to keep it as friendly as possible; sometimes we also just chat about about non-development topics.

If you’re coming to IRC with a question, you can often help us help you faster by having your logs ready.

All conversations are in English (except when someone swears in French).

How to report a bug?#

The best place to report a bug is to open an issue on GitHub. We have configured some templates to help and guide you through the process and hopefully to make it easier for you.

Before submitting your bug, you can search existing issues to see if there is one open already. If no existing issue covers your bug, please have log excerpts ready that demonstrate the problem, if possible.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you are unsure about your bug report.

How to obtain logs?#

When requesting help, you’ll probably be asked to provide logs illustrating the problem. If you report a bug, the form includes a field for “Relevant logs” that you should fill in if possible.

By default you will find Sopel’s logs in the ~/.sopel/logs folder. If homedir and/or logdir is specified in Sopel’s config file, logs will be found in /path/to/homedir/logdir if logdir is a relative path, or at /path/to/logdir if logdir is an absolute path. (If Sopel is being run as a service, the logdir should be an absolute path.)

Log files’ names start with their associated config file’s name, i.e. the --config argument’s value.

There are two main log types you might be asked to provide: sopel logs and raw logs.

Obtaining sopel logs#

<configname>.sopel.log files contain everything Sopel does from startup to shutdown.

In normal operation, the INFO (default) or WARNING logging_level is usually sufficient. For ambiguous or particularly gnarly problems, you might be asked to enable DEBUG logging and reproduce your issue to help Sopel’s developers understand what’s happening.

Obtaining raw logs#

For certain problem types, a developer might ask for raw logs to examine exactly what Sopel and the IRC server are saying to each other.

These <configname>.raw.log files are not enabled by default. If requested by the person helping you in our issue tracker or IRC channel, you can turn raw logs on using the log_raw setting in your config file.

Warning

The raw log may contain sensitive information, e.g. your bot’s NickServ account credentials, its IP address, or channel keys.

Always check the portion of your raw log that you are sharing for secrets, and censor any you find!

See also

More information about configuring Sopel’s logging is available in the Logging section.