Hedwig IRC Adapter

An IRC adapter for Hedwig, based on ExIRC

Getting started

Let's generate a new Elixir application with a supervision tree:

λ mix new alfred --sup
* creating README.md
* creating .gitignore
* creating mix.exs
* creating config
* creating config/config.exs
* creating lib
* creating lib/alfred.ex
* creating test
* creating test/test_helper.exs
* creating test/alfred_test.exs

Your Mix project was created successfully.
You can use "mix" to compile it, test it, and more:

    cd alfred
    mix test

Run "mix help" for more commands.

Change into our new application directory:

λ cd alfred

Add hedwig_irc to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
   {:hedwig_irc, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Ensure hedwig_irc is started before your application:

def application do
  [applications: [:hedwig_irc]]
end

Generate our robot

λ mix deps.get
λ mix hedwig.gen.robot

Welcome to the Hedwig Robot Generator!

Let's get started.

What would you like to name your bot?: alfred

Available adapters

1. Hedwig.Adapters.IRC
2. Hedwig.Adapters.Console
3. Hedwig.Adapters.Test

Please select an adapter: 1

* creating lib/alfred
* creating lib/alfred/robot.ex
* updating config/config.exs

Don't forget to add your new robot to your supervision tree
(typically in lib/alfred.ex):

    worker(Alfred.Robot, [])

Supervise our robot

We'll want Alfred to be supervised and started when we start our application. Let's add it to our supervision tree. Open up lib/alfred.ex and add the following to the children list:

worker(Alfred.Robot, [])

Configuration

The next thing we need to do is configure our bot for our IRC server. Open up config/config.exs and let's take a look at what was generated for us:

use Mix.Config

config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
  adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.IRC,
  name: "alfred",
  aka: "/",
  responders: [
    {Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.GreatSuccess, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.ShipIt, []},
  ]

So we have the adapter, name, aka, and responders set. The adapter is the module responsible for handling all of the IRC details like connecting and sending and receiving messages over the network. The name is the name that our bot will respond to, and must not be used by any other account registered or active on IRC. The aka (also known as) field is optional, but it allows us to address our bot with an alias. By default, this alias is set to /; we'll need to change that (since / is used by the IRC client), so we'll use ! instead.

Finally we have responders. Responders are modules that provide functions that match on the messages that get sent to our bot. We'll discuss this further in a bit.

We'll need to provide a few more things in order for us to connect to our IRC server. We'll need to provide our bot's password, the IRC server as well as a list of rooms/channels we want our bot to join once connected.

Let's see what this could look like:

use Mix.Config

config :alfred, Alfred.Robot,
  adapter: Hedwig.Adapters.IRC,
  name: "alfred",
  user: "alfred", # optional, defaults to `:name`
  full_name: "Alfred Bot", # optional, defaults to `:name`
  # we needed to change this, remember?
  aka: "!",
  # fill in the appropriate password for your bot
  password: "password",
  server: "chat.freenode.net",
  port: 6697, # optional, defaults to `6667`
  ssl?: true, # optional, defaults to `false`
  rooms: [
    # fill in the appropriate channels for your IRC server
    {"#elixir-lang", ""}
    {"#private-channel", "password-for-private-channel"}
  ],
  responders: [
    {Hedwig.Responders.Help, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.GreatSuccess, []},
    {Hedwig.Responders.ShipIt, []}
  ]

Great! We're ready to start our bot. From the root of our application, let's run the following:

λ mix run --no-halt

This will start our application along with our bot. Our bot should connect to the server and join the configured room(s). From there, we can connect with our favourite IRC client and begin sending messages to our bot.

Since we have the Help responder installed, we can say alfred help (or the shorter version using our aka, !help) and we should see a list of usage for all of the installed responders.

What's next?

Well, that's it for now. Make sure to read the Hedwig Documentation for more details on writing responders and other exciting things!

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2016 Jeff Weiss

Hedwig IRC source code is licensed under the MIT License.