Creating an interval task

Introduction

uAgents can perform an interval task to periodically perform actions with a specified time interval. An interval task is achieved thanks to an on_interval decorator which periodically repeats a given function for the agent. For instance, an agent could send a message every 2 seconds to another agent.

Let's get started and create our first interval task!

Walk-through

1. First of all, we would need to create a Python script for this task, and name it: touch interval-task.py

2. Let's then import the necessary classes from uagents library, Agent and Context, and create our uAgent:

   from uagents import Agent, Context
    
   alice = Agent(name="alice", seed="alice recovery phrase")

3. We can now define our uAgent's behavior:

   @alice.on_interval(period=2.0)
   async def say_hello(ctx: Context):
       ctx.logger.info(f'hello, my name is {ctx.name}')
    
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       alice.run()

   We can use the .on_interval() decorator to repeat a task in a specified time period. In this case, we will just define a say_hello() function to send a message every 2 seconds, saying hello and printing the name of the agent retrieved using ctx.name() method. The output will be printed out using the ctx.logger.info() method.

4. Save the script.

The overall script should look as follows:

from uagents import Agent, Context
 
alice = Agent(name="alice", seed="alice recovery phrase")
 
@alice.on_interval(period=2.0)
async def say_hello(ctx: Context):
    ctx.logger.info(f'hello, my name is {ctx.name}')
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    alice.run()

Run the script

On your terminal, make sure to have activated the virtual environment correctly.

Run the script: python interval-task.py

The output should be as follows:

hello, my name is alice
hello, my name is alice
hello, my name is alice