The Zulip API Python bindings require the following Python libraries:

• simplejson
• requests (version >= 0.12.1)

This package uses distutils, so you can just run:

python setup.py install

For now, the only fully supported API operation is sending a message. The other API queries work, but are under active development, so please make sure we know you're using them so that we can notify you as we make any changes to them.

The easiest way to use these API bindings is to base your tools off of the example tools under examples/ in this distribution.

If you place your API key in the config file ~/.zuliprc the Python API bindings will automatically read it in. The format of the config file is as follows:

[api]
key=<api key from the web interface>
email=<your email address>
site=<your Zulip server's URI>

Alternatively, you may explicitly use "--user" and "--api-key" in our examples, which is especially useful if you are running several bots which share a home directory. There is also a "--site" option for setting the Zulip server on the command line.

You can obtain your Zulip API key, create bots, and manage bots all from your Zulip settings page.

A typical simple bot sending API messages will look as follows:

At the top of the file:

# Make sure the Zulip API distribution's root directory is in sys.path, then:
import zulip
zulip_client = zulip.Client(email="[email protected]", client="MyTestClient/0.1")

When you want to send a message:

message = {
  "type": "stream",
  "to": ["support"],
  "subject": "your subject",
  "content": "your content",
}
zulip_client.send_message(message)

Additional examples:

client.send_message({'type': 'stream', 'content': 'Zulip rules!',
                     'subject': 'feedback', 'to': ['support']})
client.send_message({'type': 'private', 'content': 'Zulip rules!',
                     'to': ['[email protected]', '[email protected]']})

send_message() returns a dict guaranteed to contain the following keys: msg, result. For successful calls, result will be "success" and msg will be the empty string. On error, result will be "error" and msg will describe what went wrong.

The Zulip API comes with a ZulipStream class which can be used with the logging module:

import zulip
import logging
stream = zulip.ZulipStream(type="stream", to=["support"], subject="your subject")
logger = logging.getLogger("your_logger")
logger.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler(stream))
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
logger.info("This is an INFO test.")
logger.debug("This is a DEBUG test.")
logger.warn("This is a WARN test.")
logger.error("This is a ERROR test.")

You can use the included zulip-send script to send messages via the API directly from existing scripts.

zulip-send [email protected] [email protected] -m \
    "Conscience doth make cowards of us all."

Alternatively, if you don't want to use your ~/.zuliprc file:

zulip-send --user [email protected] \
    --api-key a0b1c2d3e4f5a6b7c8d9e0f1a2b3c4d5 \
    [email protected] [email protected] -m \
    "Conscience doth make cowards of us all."