Show HN: Ultra Easy Creating IRC Bot with New Python Mod

[robinmanoli]

https://github.com/RobinManoli/ircutil

[robinmanoli]

Although having coded for many years, this is my first open source project ever released!

I have been running my own IRC-bot on it, being stable for a few months.

Thanks for checking it out ^^

[brudgers → robinmanoli]

Curious about background readings for IRC chatbots that might be helpful for someone interested in the topic...the tutorial seems a bit schematic.

[robinmanoli → brudgers]

I'm not really sure what you can read about it. Are you familiar with IRC? IRC is a text chat protocol which has been active a long time before Facebook, MSN and even ICQ.

So an IRC bot is a kind of service for IRC chatrooms. IRC bots may define words from a dictionary, do google searches, and so on. Usually the bots answer commands such as !define some_word or !google my search.

You can read more on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_bot and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

You are right about the tutorial. I was thinking that if one is familiar with IRC it should be quite easy to get started with this.

[brudgers → robinmanoli]

Sure I've used IRC. That's a long way from programming against it.

I asked the question because I believe there are many professional developers who have a similar knowledge gap despite having vastly more programming experience than me.

That seems to often be the case with older technologies internet technologies. I mean it's probably easier to point to resources for writing Slack bots than an IRC bot.

[robinmanoli → brudgers]

Well, I'm not sure what you are really after. I think you can find tutorials for established bot modules, such as eggdrops or how to write an irssi script.

The tutorial I made is based on the code provided in the examples. There are some common bot functions there, and explanations, which might be enough to get started with your own.

Did you look at my examples which were mentioned in the tutorial? https://github.com/RobinManoli/ircutil/blob/master/examples/... https://github.com/RobinManoli/ircutil/blob/master/examples/...

One point with my module is that you can access IRC as raw text. (See how event.raw is used in get_started_bot.py). If you run this bot, you can observe how IRC looks like in text mode. Already from there you can parse any of those lines of text with Python to get started with your own bot.

Then you can use event helpers, (see examples). For example, if you want to respond to a message you use:

if event.MSG: ...

and to send a message, use:

mybot.msg(channel_or_nickname, mymessage)

[brudgers → robinmanoli]

Thanks. I appreciate it.