Reloadable plugins

Note

if you just want the bot to restart when you change a file during development you can use hupper:

$ pip install hupper
$ hupper -m irc3 config.ini

irc3 provides a way to reload plugins without restarting the bot.

To do that, your plugin should provide a reload class method:

class Plugin(object):

    def __init__(self, bot):
        self.bot = bot

    @classmethod
    def reload(cls, old):
        """this method should return a ready to use plugin instance.
        cls is the newly reloaded class. old is the old instance.
        """
        return cls(old.bot)

Plugins can also implement a few hooks to help take care of reloads:

class Plugin(object):

    def __init__(self, bot):
        self.bot = bot

    def before_reload(self):
        """Do stuff before reload"""

    def after_reload(self):
        """Do stuff after reload"""

To reload a plugin, just call the reload() method with module name(s) to reload:

>>> bot.reload('mycommands')