Manual:Pywikibot/Create your own script

Translate this page

This page lists some very basic tips for getting started writing your own bot. Make sure you've set up your user-config.py file!

You can either use the following commands in a shell, or in a script.

To open a shell, run python pwb.py shell.

As a script, please save the file as myscript.py in the scripts/userscripts/ directory, then run python pwb.py myscript.

To gain access to the pywikibot library from your Python script, use:

import pywikibot

to retrieve a page, use the following, where pageName is the title of the page you would like to retrieve (e.g., Wikipedia:Bots or India):

site = pywikibot.Site()
page = pywikibot.Page(site, "pageName")
text = page.text

to update a page, use:

page.text = "newText"
page.save("Edit comment")

look at some of the pywikibot files for other ideas -- scripts/basic.py is relatively easy to read even if you're new to pywikibot.
you can find all available Page methods in the pywikibot/page.py file.
basic.py gives you a setup that can be used for many different bots, all you have to do is define the string editing on the page text.
To iterate over a set of pages, see pywikibot/pagegenerators.py (see also old documentation) for some objects that return a set of pages. An example use of the CategoryPageGenerator that does something for each page in the Category:Living people category:

import pywikibot
from pywikibot import pagegenerators
site = pywikibot.Site()
cat = pywikibot.Category(site,'Category:Living people')
gen = pagegenerators.CategorizedPageGenerator(cat)
for page in gen:
    #Do something with the page object, for example:
    text = page.text

See also