Architecture

At its core, Charlesbot essentially works as follows:

When a message comes in through a Slack websocket, robot.py delivers a copy of the message to each Charlesbot plugin. This is done by pushing this message onto each plugin’s queue, at which point the plugin is free to consume the message on its own schedule.

This approach decouples the processing of a message from the receiving of a message, which helps in a scenario where a channel is flooded with more incoming messages than a plugin is able to handle (in a timely manner).

Abstract Base Class

The abstract base class BasePlugin handles the bulk of the message coordination which allows you to write your plugins with minimum boiler plate.

In order for this to work, you will need to inherit from BasePlugin and implement the plugin logic using at minimum the following two abstract methods:

def get_help_message(self):
    pass

def process_message(self, message):
    pass