Cinch - The IRC Bot Building Framework

The Cinch project is no longer maintained. No new features will be added, and no bugs will be fixed. The repository has been archived. If you wish to continue developing Cinch, please fork the project. I am not accepting new maintainers for this project.

Cinch is an IRC Bot Building Framework for quickly creating IRC bots in Ruby with minimal effort. It provides a simple interface based on plugins and rules. It's as easy as creating a plugin, defining a rule, and watching your profits flourish.

Cinch will do all of the hard work for you, so you can spend time creating cool plugins and extensions to wow your internet peers.

For general support, join #cinch channel on Freenode server (irc://irc.freenode.org/cinch) – but please don't bring any bots.

You can install the latest Cinch gem using RubyGems

gem install cinch

Alternatively you can check out the latest code directly from Github

git clone http://github.com/cinchrb/cinch.git

Your typical Hello, World application in Cinch would go something like this:

require 'cinch'

bot = Cinch::Bot.new do
  configure do |c|
    c.server = "irc.freenode.org"
    c.channels = ["#cinch-bots"]
  end

  on :message, "hello" do |m|
    m.reply "Hello, #{m.user.nick}"
  end
end

bot.start

More examples can be found in the examples directory.

Cinch provides a documented API, which is online for your viewing pleasure here.

Many IRC bots (and there are, so many) are great, but we see so little of them take advantage of the awesome Object Oriented Interface which most Ruby programmers will have become accustomed to and grown to love.

Well, Cinch uses this functionality to its advantage. Rather than having to pass around a reference to a channel or a user, to another method, which then passes it to another method (by which time you're confused about what's going on) -- Cinch provides an OOP interface for even the simpliest of tasks, making your code simple and easy to comprehend.

Unlike a lot of popular IRC frameworks, Cinch is threaded. But wait, don't let that scare you. It's totally easy to grasp.

Each of Cinch's plugins and handlers are executed in their own personal thread. This means the main thread can stay focused on what it does best, providing non-blocking reading and writing to an IRC server. This will prevent your bot from locking up when one of your plugins starts doing some intense operations. Damn that's handy.

That's right folks, Cinch provides a modular based plugin system. This is a feature many people have bugged us about for a long time. It's finally here, and it's as awesome as you had hoped!

This system allows you to create feature packed plugins without interfering with any of the Cinch internals. Everything in your plugin is self contained, meaning you can share your favorite plugins among your friends and release a ton of your own plugins for others to use

Want to see the same Hello, World application in plugin form? Sure you do!

require 'cinch'

class Hello
  include Cinch::Plugin

  match "hello"

  def execute(m)
    m.reply "Hello, #{m.user.nick}"
  end
end

bot = Cinch::Bot.new do
  configure do |c|
    c.server = "irc.freenode.org"
    c.channels = ["#cinch-bots"]
    c.plugins.plugins = [Hello]
  end
end

bot.start

Note: Plugins take a default prefix of /^!/ which means the actual match is !hello.

More information can be found in the {Cinch::Plugin} documentation.

Do you know what IRC code 401 represents? How about 376? or perhaps 502? Sure you don't (and if you do, you're as geeky as us!). Cinch doesn't expect you to store the entire IRC RFC code set in your head, and rightfully so!

That's exactly why Cinch has a ton of constants representing these numbers so you don't have to remember them. We're so nice.

Ever get fed up of watching those boring, frankly unreadable lines flicker down your terminal screen whilst your bot is online? Help is at hand! By default, Cinch will colorize all text it sends to a terminal, meaning you get some pretty damn awesome readable coloured text. Cinch also provides a way for your plugins to log custom messages:

on :message, /hello/ do |m|
  debug "Someone said hello"
end

Love Cinch? Love Ruby? Love helping? Of course you do! If you feel like Cinch is missing that awesome jaw-dropping feature and you want to be the one to make this magic happen, you can!

Please note that although we very much appreciate all of your efforts, Cinch will not accept patches in aid of Ruby 1.8 compatibility. We have no intention of supporting Ruby versions below 1.9.1.

Fork the project, implement your awesome feature in its own branch, and send a pull request to one of the Cinch collaborators. We'll be more than happy to check it out.