Creating plugins

There are three methods used for creating basil plugins.

Email

Recently, basil gained the ability to check email. What basil does with these emails depends on the plugins defined in the following way:

class AnObject
  def self.create_message(email)
    # this method must accept a Basil::Email::Mail and (possibly) return
    # a Basil::Message. If it does, the message will be handed to your
    # server's broadcast_message method.
  end
end

Basil.check_email(AnObject)

Email is polled (on the interval set in your config file) if and only if your server actually responds to the broadcast_message method

Responders

A responder will only be used on messages that are "to basil":

Basil.respond_to(/a regex/) do

  # logic that either returns a Message or nil

end

Within the block, you have access to two very useful instance variables:

• @msg is the Message that the plugin is currently responding to
• @match_data contains the MatchData object that resulted from applying your regex

You've also got all the methods from Basil::Utils and Basil::ChatHistory.

Watchers

Watchers are exactly like responders except that they can be triggered on messages to anyone. One example might be to show titles for any urls mentioned in the chat:

Basil.watch_for(/https?:\/\/\S+/) do

  if get_html(@match_data[0]) =~ /<title>(.*?)<\/title>/
    says "Title: #{$1}"
  end

end