Cakewalk - The IRC Bot Building Framework

Cakewalk is an attempt at reviving a retired IRC bot building framework called cinch. While the codebase seems to be working just fine with Ruby versions up to 2.7.x, our main focus is Ruby 3.x.

Description

Cakewalk is an IRC bot building framework for quickly creating IRC bots in Ruby with minimal effort. It provides a simple interface based on plugins and rules. It's as easy as creating a plugin, defining a rule, and watching your profits flourish.

Cakewalk will do all of the hard work for you, so you can spend time creating cool plugins and extensions to wow your internet peers.

For general support, join #cakewalk channel on the Libera.chat network.

Installation

RubyGems

You can install the latest Cakewalk gem using RubyGems

gem install cakewalk

GitHub

Alternatively you can check out the latest code directly from Github

git clone https://github.com/petru/cakewalk.git

Example

Your typical Hello, World application in Cakewalk would go something like this:

require 'cakewalk'

bot = Cakewalk::Bot.new do
  configure do |c|
    c.server = "irc.libera.chat"
    c.channels = ["#cakewalk-bots"]
  end

  on :message, "hello" do |m|
    m.reply "Hello, #{m.user.nick}"
  end
end

bot.start

More examples can be found in the examples directory.

Features

Documentation

Cakewalk provides a documented API, which is online for your viewing pleasure here.

Object Oriented

Many IRC bots (and there are, so many) are great, but we see so little of them take advantage of the awesome Object Oriented Interface which most Ruby programmers will have become accustomed to and grown to love.

Well, Cakewalk uses this functionality to its advantage. Rather than having to pass around a reference to a channel or a user, to another method, which then passes it to another method (by which time you're confused about what's going on) -- Cakewalk provides an OOP interface for even the simpliest of tasks, making your code simple and easy to comprehend.

Threaded

Unlike a lot of popular IRC frameworks, Cakewalk is threaded. But wait, don't let that scare you. It's totally easy to grasp.

Each of Cakewalk's plugins and handlers are executed in their own personal thread. This means the main thread can stay focused on what it does best, providing non-blocking reading and writing to an IRC server. This will prevent your bot from locking up when one of your plugins starts doing some intense operations. Damn that's handy.

Plugins

That's right folks, Cakewalk provides a modular based plugin system. This is a feature many people have bugged us about for a long time. It's finally here, and it's as awesome as you had hoped!

This system allows you to create feature packed plugins without interfering with any of the Cakewalk internals. Everything in your plugin is self contained, meaning you can share your favorite plugins among your friends and release a ton of your own plugins for others to use

Want to see the same Hello, World application in plugin form? Sure you do!

require 'cakewalk'

class Hello
  include Cakewalk::Plugin

  match "hello"

  def execute(m)
    m.reply "Hello, #{m.user.nick}"
  end
end

bot = Cakewalk::Bot.new do
  configure do |c|
    c.server = "irc.libera.chat"
    c.channels = ["#cakewalk-bots"]
    c.plugins.plugins = [Hello]
  end
end

bot.start

Note: Plugins take a default prefix of /^!/ which means the actual match is !hello.

More information can be found in the {Cakewalk::Plugin} documentation.

Numeric Replies

Do you know what IRC code 401 represents? How about 376? or perhaps 502? Sure you don't (and if you do, you're as geeky as us!). Cakewalk doesn't expect you to store the entire IRC RFC code set in your head, and rightfully so!

That's exactly why Cakewalk has a ton of constants representing these numbers so you don't have to remember them. We're so nice.

Pretty Output

Ever get fed up of watching those boring, frankly unreadable lines flicker down your terminal screen whilst your bot is online? Help is at hand! By default, Cakewalk will colorize all text it sends to a terminal, meaning you get some pretty damn awesome readable coloured text. Cakewalk also provides a way for your plugins to log custom messages:

on :message, /hello/ do |m|
  debug "Someone said hello"
end

Contribute

Love Cakewalk? Love Ruby? Love helping? Of course you do! If you feel like Cakewalk is missing that awesome jaw-dropping feature and you want to be the one to make this magic happen, you can!

Fork the project, implement your awesome feature in its own branch, and send a pull request to one of the Cakewalk collaborators. We'll be more than happy to check it out.