Summer

Summer is an IRC Bot "framework" "inspired" by http://github.com/RISCFuture/autumn. Its goal is to be tiny.

The project is currently in "preview" state 'cause that's all the rage nowadays. No there's no invites, BUT everybody gets access to it. Sorry to inform you that you'll have to clone it and then run rake install if you want to use it.

To use summer, create a file like this:

require 'rubygems'
require 'summer'

class Bot < Summer::Connection

end

Bot.new("localhost")

Running it will make your bot attempt to connect to the server on localhost. For those of you who do not have an IRC server running locally, I would suggest trying irc.freenode.net instead.

In the same directory create a directory called config and in that put summer.yml which can have the following keys:

• server: The IRC server url the bot will connect to. Can also be passed in to the initializer as the first argument.
• use_ssl: true or false defaults to false. If an IRC server requires SSL, it will establish the connection
• nick: The nickname of the bot.
• server_password: Password to authenticate with a server, if the irc server requires it.
• nickserv_password: Password to send to nickserv after connection but before joining any channels
• channel: A channel to join on startup.
• channels: Channels to join on startup. e.g. ['RubyOnRails', 'ruby']
• auto_rejoin: Set this to true if you want the bot to re-join any channel it's kicked from.

The following are some methods you can define in your class which inherits from Summer::Connection.

Called when the bot has received the final MOTD line (376 or 422) and has finished joining all the channels.

Called when the bot receives a channel message.

• sender (Hash): Contains nick and hostname
• channel (String): The channel name: e.g. "#logga"
• message (String): The message that was received

Called when the bot receives a private message.

• sender (Hash): Contains nick and hostname
• bot (String): The bot's name.
• message (String): The message that was received

Called when the bot sees someone join a channel.

• sender (Hash): Contains nick and hostname
• channel (String): The channel name: e.g. "#logga"

Called when someone parts a channel.

• sender (Hash): Contains nick and hostname
• channel (String): The channel name: e.g. "#logga"
• message (String): The message that was received

Called when someone quits the server.

• sender (Hash): Contains nick and hostname
• message (String): The message that was received.

Called when someone is kicked from a channel.

• kicker (Hash): Contains nick and hostname
• channel (String): The channel name: e.g. "#logga"
• victim (String): Just the nick of whoever was kicked.
• message (String): The message that was received.

Called when a mode in a channel changes.

• User (Hash): Contains nick and hostname.
• channel (String): The channel name: e.g. "#logga"
• mode (String): The mode that was set/unset.
• extra_parts (String): The extra parts after the mode set/unset (if any).

If you wish to handle raw messages that come into your bot you can define a handle_xxx method for that where xxx is the three-digit representation of the raw you wish to handle.

Slack is becoming more and more popular; though many of us still like our IRC & IRC bots. The good thing is Slack offers an IRC and XMPP gateway!

Setting up summer to connect to slack is quite simple:

Your Slack team's owner will first need to enable team-wide gateway access at my-channel.slack.com/admin/settings, in the Gateways section under the Permissions tab. It must be an owner, not just an admin.

Once the gateway is enabled, your bot (and other team members) can get connection instructions and their unique gateway password at: my-channel.slack.com/account/gateways.

In your config/summer.yml file, add your credentials:

nick:              ENV['NICK']
use_ssl:           true
server_password:   ENV['SERVER_PASS']
channels:          ['general', 'random']

Then start your bot per usual:

Bot.new(ENV['IRC_SERVER'])