Awesome

An extensible ircbot written in Erlang

It all started when I decided I need to learn Erlang. At the same time I needed a simple ircbot to handle some of the channels I frequent on. These two things put together and I decided to start this project.

The evolution of my knowledge can be best seen from the history of the git commits.

Now that the bot is extensible by plug-ins, and quite stable it's becoming pretty useful. It still needs improvements and is work in progress, but plug-ins can be written for anything.

Patches, help and feature requests can be sent on the github issue tracker. There's a TODO list I keep there too.

The bot is MIT licensed (for no particular reason), it's a very liberal license with no strings, so you can really do whatever you want with it.

Quick start

First, compile everything:

rebar3 compile

Second, edit and rename the settings.cfg.example file to settings.cfg. Then start an Erlang REPL shell:

rebar3 shell --start-clean

Once in the Erlang REPL you can start the bot with:

{ok, [{ connection, Settings }]} = file:consult("settings.cfg").
{ok, IrcBot} = ircbot_fsm:start(Settings).
gen_fsm:sync_send_all_state_event(IrcBot, {add_plugin, ircbot_plugin_uptime, []}).

You can make changes to the source code & plugins while the bot is running. Just hit "rebar3 compile" in another terminal and then, if everything is ok, in the Erlang REPL run:

l(ircbot_plugin_uptime).

to reload the ircbot_plugin_uptime uptime module.

or

l(ircbot_fsm).

to reload the ircbot_fsm module.

Erlangs code switching and the gen_fsm/gen_event frameworks will handle all the details to run the new code without even disconnecting.

Real OTP Application

rebar3 as prod release

An Erlang release will be in _build/prod/rel/ircbot/, an alternative is to get a tarball with rebar3 as prod tar.