Introduction

This is the documentation for vk-botting, a library for Python to aid in creating applications that utilise the VK API.

Prerequisites

vk-botting works with Python 3.6.0 or higher. Support for earlier versions of Python is not provided. Python 2.7 or lower is not supported.

Installing

You can get the library directly from PyPI:

python3 -m pip install -U vk-botting

If you are using Windows, then the following should be used instead:

py -3 -m pip install -U vk-botting

Virtual Environments

Sometimes you want to keep libraries from polluting system installs or use a different version of libraries than the ones installed on the system. You might also not have permissions to install libaries system-wide. For this purpose, the standard library as of Python 3.3 comes with a concept called “Virtual Environment”s to help maintain these separate versions.

A more in-depth tutorial is found on Virtual Environments and Packages.

However, for the quick and dirty:

1. Go to your project’s working directory:

   $ cd your-bot-source
   $ python3 -m venv bot-env
   

2. Activate the virtual environment:

   $ source bot-env/bin/activate
   

   On Windows you activate it with:

   $ bot-env\Scripts\activate.bat
   

3. Use pip like usual:

   $ pip install -U vk-botting
   

Congratulations. You now have a virtual environment all set up.

Basic Concepts

vk-botting revolves around the concept of events. An event is something you listen to and then respond to. For example, when a message happens, you will receive an event about it that you can respond to.

A quick example to showcase how events work:

import vk_botting


class MyBot(vk_botting.Bot):
    async def on_ready(self):
        print(f'Logged on as {self.group.name}!')

    async def on_message_new(self, message):
        author = await message.get_author()
        print(f'Message from {author.first_name}: {message.text}')


bot = MyBot('your-prefix-here')
bot.run('your-token-here')