Dear *,

one goal of the IntelMQ 3.0 release (which is planned for this summer) is to make the handling of configuration files easier and also to lower the bar for adding new bots. With two bigger merge requests merged in the last few weeks, we are now one step closer to that goal:

The first change affects how bots handle their configuration. IntelMQ Bots used to work with a dict called `parameters` that contained all their settings and the settings of the parent bots and default values and everything was merged together at some point. When adding a bot those parameters had to be checked in the bot class itself, they had to be added to the `defaults.conf` and to the `BOTS` file. We now changed that approach and bots now simply define their parameters as (public) class attributes. When the bot is initialized, we iterate through the public attributes and check if they are set to a custom value in the configuration and if so, we use that value instead. This also works for all the attributes the bot inherits from parent classes. In addition, the default values for the variables are now set in the bot classes directly and not in a separate `defaults.conf` file. While adding all the attributes to the bots, we also tried to add typing information- we are not sure yet how exactly we will use that information, but at least its there and shows what kind of value is expected. Another additional information in the bots is the docstring, which we added to every bot class.

The second change made the `BOTS` file obsolete. The `BOTS` file contained a list of all the available bots, together with their description, their modulepath and their parameters. Sebastian Waldbauer tirelessly worked on refactoring the code and added a function to generate the list of bots on the fly. Based on that Sebastian Wagner polished the PR by cleaning up a big amount of stale code in the bot classes, testing the changes and adding documentation.

So it will now be possible to add new bots without having to deal with the `BOTS` file or the `defaults.conf`. The latter still exists, mainly because the `intelmqctl` script still uses it, but that will be an easy fix.

We also updated the documentation accordingly, as you can see in the development version of the Developer Guide [0].

[0] https://intelmq.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/guide.html

cheers, Birger