A Quick Introduction to Marvin

Welcome young one – in today’s lesson we’re going to learn
how to build a simple IRC bot using Marvin.
If you haven’t built an IRC bot before, there is a great
deal of things you can do – ranging from consuming content (e.g.
analysing logs of IRC rooms, seeing who swears the most)
as well as other things such as bridges between other
protocols (twitter => irc bridges) and all sorts of fancy stuff.

What is this marvin thingy-majiggy?

Marvin is an IRC Library / Framework (it can be used either way)
built with an evented design on top of DRb, EventMachine and a bunch
of other stuff for Ruby. it’s currently got a fairly complete client
and a very incomplete server implementation.

Step #1 – Getting Marvin

There are currently two different ways to get marvin – via the
GitHub gem sources or directly from the source.

To install from the GitHub gem source, simply use:

Alternatively, you can directly clone the repository. To do this, you’ll need to run the
following:

Once that’s done, not only will you now have a handy “marvin” gem which you
can require but you will also have a handy executable of the same name which
you can use.

Step #2 – Creating a Skeleton App

By default, marvin currently uses a simple skeleton app (not unlike
Ruby on Rails) as a starting point. To get started, you simply use
the “marvin create” command with a path to / folder name (which must not
yet exist) into which you wish to create the folder. For example, if I wanted
to create a new irc bot called “BlorkBot”, I could do the following:

And a new directory with the basic structure called “BlorkBot” will be created
under the current directory. To get started, you can then open your editor and
browse the given folder. Of this generated structure, there are only two folders
you need to worry about for the moment – config and handlers.

Step #3 – Basic configuration