Getting Started with rbot

First Time Wizard

The first time when rbot is run, a "wizard" will help you configure some basic options. After each question, there is a prompt like the following:

auth.password [rbotauth]: 

The strings with dots in them, such as auth.password, are configuration keys in rbot, which will be explained in the Configuration section. The values enclosed in [ ] are defaults for the configuration, which will be used if you just type Enter at the prompt. After you finish the wizard, rbot will have all the information necessary to run.

Issuing Commands

After rbot connects to the IRC server, you can interact with it with commands. You can either use the command prefix, or address the rbot's nickname to get its attention. See Example Session for examples.

Help

In order to find out available commands and their usage, help is the command to use. It will display a list of phrases which are topics, in which the commands are organized. help <topic> will usually list the commands related to the topic. Sometimes it will refer to more topics, so use help <topic> <sub-topic>. Once you find an interesting command, use help <command> to see its purpose and usage.

Authorizing as Owner

Issuing some commands and modifying some configuration require owner status. That is the purpose of the password you were asked for in the First Time Wizard. In rbot 0.9.10 and before, use auth <password>, and 0.9.11 and after (including current SVN), use login owner <password> to let rbot know you're its owner. See RbotSecurity for more information.

Configuration

You can customize the configuration using the config command. The many configuration options are organized in modules, which are listed with config list. For example, settings related behavior on the IRC server are in the irc module, and for the IMDB plugin are in the imdb module. You can list all the configuration keys in a module with config list <module>.To see what each key means, use config desc <key>.

To display the current value of a key, use config get <key>. To change configuration, usually use config set <key>, but some configuration keys have values which are lists; in such cases you can use config add <value> to <key>, config rm <value> from <key> to edit them. For example, to let rbot automatically join #mychannel, config add #mychannel to irc.join_channels.