Your first plugin#

Sopel’s most interesting features come from its plugins, either published by Sopel’s developers or by third-party developers, and you can write your own plugins. But where do you start?

Here is a very short example of code for your first plugin that contains one and only one command:

from sopel import plugin

@plugin.command('hello')
def hello(bot, trigger):
    """Reply with Hello!"""
    bot.reply('Hello!')

You can put this code in a Python file, placed into your Sopel plugin directory, such as ~/.sopel/plugins/myplugin.py. Once this is done, you can check if the bot can see the plugin, by using the sopel-plugins command line tool:

$ sopel-plugins show myplugin
Plugin: myplugin
Status: enabled
Type: python-file
Source: /path/to/home/.sopel/plugins/myplugin.py
Label: myplugin plugin
Loaded successfully
Setup: no
Shutdown: no
Configure: no

Notice how the filename (without the extension) is also the name of the plugin: if you were to name your file hello.py, it would be the hello plugin.

If status is not enabled, you can enable your plugin with sopel-plugins enable hello.

Then, you can start your bot and trigger the command like this:

<YourNick> .hello
<Sopel> YourNick: Hello!

And voilà! This is your first plugin. Sure, it doesn’t do much, and yet it uses the key elements that you’ll need to understand to write your own plugins.