Birch - Broadcastable IRC Helper

Birch is a plugin that allows you to broadcast events from your rails project into the IRC channel(s) of your choice.

There are many different ways to use Birch, and we've provided a couple of examples in this README. What is unique about Birch is that it adds a DRB server / client to your existing Rails application. This means if you so choose you can completely decouple Birch IRC server from the rails loading process and still easily make announcements into the channel with no change to the existing code.

Installation

Run install.rb

This will copy a default birch.yaml file into your config folder. Modify the yaml file with your specific requirements.

Birch will start automatically if you run the server in production mode. To start your server in any environment other than production use this environment variable:

BIRCH=true ruby script/server

Example Usage

Say you want you want announce account signups into your private IRC channel.

Suppose you already have a UserObserver class which sends an email to a user when they first sign up. This is an ideal place to insert a call to Birch.

  class AccountObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
    def after_create(account)
      BircBot.instance.say("#{account.display_name} just created an account!")
    end
  end

Then somewhere in your channel you'll get a notice from your Birchbot.

Other Possible Uses

Notify the channel when:

1. exceptions occur
2. signups happen
3. a widget was sold
4. a comment was made etc. etc. etc.

Credits

Birch was developed by Locus Focus Inc., please feel free to let us know how you like the software and if you hit any snags, while trying to use it.

Copyright (c) 2008 Locus Focus Inc., released under the MIT license