Isaac - the smallish DSL for writing IRC bots

Features

• Wraps parsing of incoming messages and raw IRC commands in simple constructs.
• Hides all the ugly regular expressions of matching IRC commands. Leaves only the essentials for you to match.
• Takes care of dull stuff such as replying to PING-messages and avoiding excess flood.

Getting started

An Isaac-bot needs a few basics:

  require 'isaac'
  configure do |c|
    c.nick    = "AwesomeBot"
    c.server  = "irc.freenode.net"
    c.port    = 6667
  end

That’s it. Run ruby bot.rb and it will connect to the specified server.

Connecting

After the bot has connected to the IRC server you might want to join some channels:

  on :connect do
    join "#awesome_channel", "#WesternBar"
  end

Responding to messages

Joining a channel and sitting idle is not much fun. Let’s repeat everything being said in these channels:

  on :channel do
    msg channel, message
  end

Notice the channel and message variables. Additionally nick and match is available for channel-events. nick being the sender of the message, match being an array of captures from the regular expression:

  on :channel, /^quote this: (.*)/ do
    msg channel, "Quote: '#{match[0]}' by #{nick}"
  end

If you want to match private messages use the +on :private+ event:

  on :private, /^login (\S+) (\S+)/ do
    username = match[0]
    password = match[1]
    # do something to authorize or whatevz.
    msg nick, "Login successful!"
  end

Defining helpers

Helpers should not be defined in the top level, but instead using the helpers-constructor:

  helpers do
    def rain_check(meeting)
      msg nick, "Can I have a rain check on the #{meeting}?"
    end
  end

  on :private, /date/ do
    rain_check("romantic date")
  end

Errors, errors, errors

Errors, as specified by RFC 1459, can be reacted upon as well. If you e.g. try to send a message to a non-existant nick you will get error 401: "No such nick/channel".

  on :error, 401 do
    # Do something.
  end

Available variables: nick and channel.

Send commands from outside an event (not implemented in Shaft atm)

You might want to send messages, join channels etc. without it strictly being the result of an on()-event, e.g. send a message every time a RSS feed is updated or whatever. You can use +Isaac.execute+ for that, and all your normal commands, msg, join, topic etc. will be available:

  class K
    def smoke(brand)
      Isaac.execute { msg "harryjr", "you should smoke #{brand} cigarettes" }
    end
  end

  on :connect do
    k = K.new
    k.smoke("Lucky Strike")
  end

Contribute

The source is hosted at GitHub: github.com/ichverstehe/isaac

License

The MIT. Google it.