Comment 1 for bug 216852

This is not really a bug, it was rather intended to be a feature. In ~/.p1tr you should have a working P1tr installation. This way of proceeding is most useful for normal users, not developers.
However, this is a bit uncomfortable, so you can, as a workaround, copy ~/.p1tr/bot,conf to your P1tr directory for development.

I will commit a change which enables you to use ~/.p1tr/bot.conf when starting P1tr from your development directory.