Installing Limnoria on GNU/Linux and UNIX (FreeBSD, macOS, …)

This is the “easy to follow” guide to installing Limnoria. The installation documentation provided with the supybot distribution is really quite good already, but since people keep coming to IRC, asking a repeating pattern of questions, we thought it would be a good idea to expand it a bit to make it a little more of a “foolproof guide”.

This guide is for non-Windows operating systems. If you want to install on Windows, check out the Windows install guide.

Note

Limnoria is a modified version of Supybot.

Install

Install using your OS’ package manager

On Debian (8.0 and above) or Ubuntu (16.10 and above)

sudo apt-get install limnoria

Note that stable / LTS releases may not have the latest features or bug fixes for Limnoria. If you want a newer version than what’s in the default repositories, you can enable Backports on Debian or Unit 193’s PPA on Ubuntu.

On Fedora (23 and above)

sudo dnf install limnoria

On CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

You have to first add the EPEL repository (EL7, EL6, EL5) before being able to install the package on CentOS / RHEL. Once you have, you can run the following command to install Limnoria:

sudo yum install limnoria

On FreeBSD

Port:

cd /usr/ports/irc/py-limnoria && sudo PYTHON_VERSION=3.8 make install clean

Package:

sudo pkg install py38-limnoria

On Arch Linux

You can install Limnoria from the AUR, using either limnoria (stable releases) or limnoria-git (git snapshots).

On Gentoo

sudo emerge net-irc/limnoria

With Guix and GuixSD

guix package --install limnoria

Other operating systems (manual install)

If you followed the section above, skip this one.

Dependencies

The only mandatory dependency is Python 3.4 or greater.

You may also install chardet and feedparser, which are used by Limnoria if they are available.

The remaining of this guide will assume you have Python 3.

Install Python

Python will usually come by installed by default in your distribution. If not, grab the appropriate packages from the distribution’s repository, or download it from https://python.org.

If you’re installing Python using your distribution’s packages, you may need a ‘’python-dev’’ or ‘’python-devel’’ package installed, too. To see if this is the case, open up a terminal, start python, and run:

import distutils

If it works, you’re good to go. Otherwise, install the python3-dev or python3-devel package and try again.

You may also install “manually” by downloading the source archive from https://python.org, and compiling it. That is outside the scope of this guide, however.

Install Limnoria

In the next section of this guide we will use pip, which is a generic way of installing Python software.

There are some alternative install methods at the bottom of this guide, if you don’t want to use pip.

Global installation (with root access)

If you do not have root access, skip this section.

If you are logged in as root, you can remove sudo from the install commands.

If you want to use the testing branch which might be more up-to date BUT LESS TESTED, replace master with testing in the commands.

First, install Limnoria’s optional dependencies (you can skip this step, but some features won’t be available):

sudo python3 -m pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ProgVal/Limnoria/master/requirements.txt --upgrade

Then Limnoria itself:

sudo python3 -m pip install limnoria --upgrade

If you have an error saying No module named pip, install pip using your package manager (the package is usually named python3-pip).

Local installation (without root access)

If you have followed the previous section, skip this one.

Simply add --user to the end of both commands. First we install requirements (you can skip it, but some features won’t be available) and then Limnoria itself.:

python3 -m pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ProgVal/Limnoria/master/requirements.txt --user --upgrade
python3 -m pip install limnoria --user --upgrade

You might need to add $HOME/.local/bin to your PATH.:

echo 'PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.$(echo $SHELL|cut -d/ -f3)rc
source ~/.$(echo $SHELL|cut -d/ -f3)rc

If you have an error saying No module named pip, install pip using this guide: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/

Configuration

We are now ready to configure Supybot. Supybot creates quite a few auxiliary files/directories to store its runtime data. It is thus recommended to create an empty directory from which you’ll be running supybot, to keep all the data in a nice dedicated location. For example, you may create a ‘runbot’ directory inside your home directory.

Now you can cd to your ‘runbot’ directory, and from within it run supybot-wizard, which will walk you through a series of questions to generate the bot config file.

One thing to make sure to do in the wizard, to make your life easier down the line, is to select y for the Would you like to add an owner user for your bot? question, and actually create the owner user. Remember that password, so that you can later ‘’identify’’ with the bot on IRC and administer it.

Once you generate the config file, which will be named yourbotnick.conf (where “yourbotnick” is the nick you have chosen for your bot in the wizard), it will be placed in your ‘runbot’ directory. (As long as you leave the default answer to the ‘’Where would you like to create these directories?’’ question.)

Now to start the bot, run, still from within the ‘runbot’ directory:

supybot yourbotnick.conf

And watch the magic!

For a tutorial on using and managing the bot from here on, see the Supybook.

Alternative install methods

If you know what you are doing and you don’t want to use pip, you can use one of these methods: