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Install guide

Valentin Lorentz edited this page Aug 20, 2017 · 11 revisions

This page is not up-to-date, please see https://limnoria.readthedocs.io/en/latest/use/install.html instead.

This is the "easy to follow" guide to installing supybot. The installation documentation provided with the supybot distribution (INSTALL, GETTING_STARTED) is really quite good already, but since people keep coming to IRC, asking a repeating pattern of questions, we thought it would be a good idea to expand it a bit to make it a little more of a "foolproof guide".

Table of Contents

Dependencies

Here's the list of required software to run Supybot:

  • Supybot is written in Python, and requires Python 2.6 or greater
And recommanded software:
  • PySQLite -- Version 3.x (most Python distributions include it by default)
  • Twisted -- Version 1.2.0 or greater (unless you actually want to use Twisted, you don't actually need it)
  • SQLAlchemy -- If you want the Aka plugin (and probably other plugins in the future)

Installation: UNIX/Linux/BSD

Install Python

Python will usually come by installed by default in your distribution. If not, grab the appropriate packages from the distribution's repository.

If you're installing Python using your distribution's packages, you may need a python-dev or python-devel package installed, too. To see if this is the case, open up a terminal, start python, and run

 import distutils
If it works, you're good to go. Otherwise, install the python-dev or python-devel package and try again.

You may also install "manually" by downloading the source archive from http://python.org, and compiling it. That is outside the scope of this guide, however.

Install Supybot

We are now ready to install supybot itself. Most distributions have a supybot package in the repositories. This is probably the easiest way to install. If that is what you want to do, that's fine, and you're ready to move on to the next section. :)

However, supybot tends to be actively developed, and it's best to grab the latest codebase. Easiest way to do that is to clone the repository with running:

 git clone git://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria.git

You can also click the "Downloads" button at the Limnoria repository. Then, extract the tarball/zipball to some temporary directory, and cd into the supybot directory which contains the extracted code.

If you have root access

Run, as root,

python setup.py install
If all goes according to plan, the supybot python module will be installed to somewhere like '/usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages', and a few supybot scripts will be installed to somewhere like '/usr/bin' or '/usr/local/bin'.

If you don't have root access, or want a local install

You can install Supybot in a local directory by using the --user option when running setup.py. E.g.,

python setup.py install --user
to install into a .local directory inside your home directory. You'll now have a $HOME/.local/bin directory containing Supybot programs ('supybot', 'supybot-wizard', etc.) and a $HOME/.local/lib directory containing the Supybot libraries.

Configure Supybot

We are now ready to configure Supybot. Supybot creates quite a few auxiliary files/directories to store its runtime data. It is thus recommended to create an empty directory from which you'll be running supybot, to keep all the data in a nice dedicated location. For example, you may create a 'runbot' directory inside your home directory.

Now you can cd to your 'runbot' directory, and from within it run supybot-wizard, which will walk you through a series of questions to generate the bot config file.

One thing to make sure to do in the wizard, to make your life easier down the line, is to select y for the Would you like to add an owner user for your bot? question, and actually create the owner user. Remember that password, so that you can later identify with the bot on IRC and administer it.

Once you generate the config file, which will be named yourbotnick.conf (where "yourbotnick" is the nick you have chosen for your bot in the wizard), it will be placed in your 'runbot' directory. (As long as you leave the default answer to the Where would you like to create these directories? question.)

Now to start the bot, run, still from within the 'runbot' directory

supybot yourbotnick.conf
And watch the magic!

For a tutorial on using and managing the bot from here on, see the supybook.

Installation: OS X

The steps are essentially the same as those of the previous section, except there are no repositories. Grab the latest python installer for OS X from http://python.org, and follow the rest of the steps.

Installation: Windows

Install Python

Download the latest Python 2 installer from http://python.org, (Python 2.7, as of March 6, 2011) and run it to install Python.

The rest of this document will assume that you have Python 2.7, and thus that your install directory is C:\Python27.

Install Supybot

We are now ready to install Supybot itself. First, you need to grab the latest code snapshot of Supybot. Easiest way to do that is to clone the repository with running `git clone git://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria.git`, but you can also click the "Downloads" button at the Limnoria repository.

If you downloaded the code archive, extract it to some temporary directory, and cd into the supybot directory which contains the extracted code.

Once you have the code archive, extract it to some temporary directory, then open up a command prompt (Programs -> Run -> cmd) and cd into the supybot directory which contains the extracted code. For example, if you have extracted the archive to C:\sometempdir\, you would enter in the prompt:

cd "C:\sometempdir\supybot"

Once there, run the installer to install, with the following command:

C:\Python27\python.exe setup.py install
This will place some supybot scripts under C:\Python27\Scripts\, and the supybot python module under C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages

Configure Supybot

We are now ready to configure Supybot. Supybot creates quite a few auxiliary files/directories to store its runtime data. It is thus recommended to create an empty directory from which you'll be running supybot, to keep all the data in a nice dedicated location. For example, you may create a 'C:\runbot' for this purpose.

Now you open a command prompt, and cd to your 'C:\runbot' directory:

cd "C:\runbot"
and from within it run supybot-wizard:
C:\Python27\python.exe C:\Python27\Scripts\supybot-wizard
which will walk you through a series of questions to generate the bot config file.

One thing to make sure to do in the wizard, to make your life easier down the line, is to select y for the Would you like to add an owner user for your bot? question, and actually create the owner user. Remember that password, so that you can later identify with the bot on IRC and administer it.

Once you generate the config file, which will be named yourbotnick.conf (where "yourbotnick" is the nick you have chosen for your bot in the wizard), it will be placed in your 'runbot' directory. (As long as you leave the default answer to the Where would you like to create these directories? question.)

Now to start the bot, run, still from within the 'C:\runbot' directory:

C:\Python27\python.exe C:\Python27\Scripts\supybot yourbotnick.conf
And watch the magic!

For a tutorial on using and managing the bot from here on, see the supybook.

This guide has been mainly written by nanotube (Daniel Folkinshteyn), and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license and/or the GNU Free Documentation License v 1.3 or later.

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