ircbot 0.1dev

a rather simple echo irc bot to stand as a simple example of how this could be done.

background

On Feb 13th I joined the PyLadies folks (along with a friend, @btanaka) to learn about how to make an IRC bot.

There was no formal presentation, but it was a great opportunity to get together with friends and hack. The notes from the event can be found here, with relevant code found at this GitHub repo.

I can understand why Rachel would have started with a repository that wouldn’t have required a single sudo or pip command: K.I.S.S . There is overhead associated with teaching pip/virtualenv/etc. when people don’t know what that is.

After perusing the code in that repo, however, I thought that there had to be a simpler way. Back in December the question of making an IRC bot came up in the BayPIGgies mailing list, and Guido hisself answered with one word: Twisted.

I thought I ought to look at what it would take, and turns out that it isn’t much; I made this repo/package so that people could grab the source, run setup.py develop, and hack/execute to their heart’s content.

I hope someone finds it useful.

installation

If you’re going to hack, clone this repo:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/smcquay/ircbot
cd ircbot
python setup.py develop

And then continue to add code to ircbot.IRCBot.privmsg.

If you’re not going to hack and just want a simple echo server:

pip install ircbot

execution

Once you’ve installed the bot, you can invoke it as such:

ircbot -p 6668 -n echobot python utah-python

or consult ircbot -h.