Configurations and storage

Configurations and Permanent Storage

As described in Directories, each module has been allocated with a folder per profile for configurations and other storage. The path can be obtained using get_data_path() with your module ID. All such storage is specific to only one profile.

For configurations, we recommend to use <module_data_path>/config.yaml. Similarly, we prepared get_config_path() to get the path for default config file. Again, you are not forced to use this name or YAML as the format of your config file.

Usually in the storage folder lives:

• Configuration files

• User credentials / Session storage

• Databases

Temporary Storage

While processing multimedia messages, we inevitably need to store certain files temporarily, either within the channel or across channels. Usually, temporary files can be handled with Python’s tempfile library.

Wizard

If your module requires relatively complicated configuration, it would be helpful to provide users with a wizard to check prerequisites of your module and guide them to setup your module for use.

From version 2, EFB introduced a centralised wizard program to allow users to enable or disable modules in a text-based user interface (TUI). If you want to include your wizard program as a part of the wizard, you can include a new entry point in your setup.py with Setuptools’ Entry Point feature.

The group for wizard program is ehforwarderbot.wizard, and the entry point function MUST accept 2 positional arguments: profile ID and instance ID.

Example

setup.py script

setup(
    # ...
    entry_points={
        "ehforwarderbot.wizard": ['alice.irc = efb_irc_slave.wizard:main']
    },
    # ...
)

.egg-info/entry_points.txt

[ehforwarderbot.wizard]
alice.irc = efb_irc_slave.wizard:main

efb_irc_slave/wizard.py

# ...

def main(profile, instance):
    print("Welcome to the setup wizard of my channel.")
    print("You are setting up this channel in profile "
          "'{0}' and instance '{1}'.".format(profile, instance))
    print("Press ENTER/RETURN to continue.")
    input()

    step1()

    # ...