ircbridge

Type-safe swiss army knife for bi-directional IRC bridging.

Usage

Preferred backend is AMQP using rabbitmq. See ./nixos/example.nix for an example NixOS deployment. The ZRE backend, while fully functional is a bit less reliable and considered experimental. A simple UNIX socket backend might be added in future.

Sending messages to IRC

Use ircbridge-amqp-cat to send a message to IRC channel or user:

ircbridge-amqp-cat --chan "#bottest" "I'm a bot"
ircbridge-amqp-cat --chan "#bottest" --notice "Sent as a /notice"
ircbridge-amqp-cat --user "@srk" Hi

Receiving messages from IRC

Use ircbridge-amqp-tail to print messages received by the bot.

IRCCat compatible

ircbridge-amqp-irccat offers irccat compatible layer.

ircbridge-amqp-irccat

allows to pipe target(s) and message to its stdin, for example:

echo "#bottest Helo" | ircbridge-amqp-irccat
echo "@user Hi" | ircbridge-amqp-irccat

Multiple targets are also supported

echo "#bottest,@user,#chan2 Hi all" | ircbridge-amqp-irccat

It is also possible to pass the default target via --chan or --user arugments:

echo "Send to default target" | ircbridge-amqp-irccat --chan "#bottest"

To send message as a notice, use --notice flag

echo "#bottest Helo" | ircbridge-amqp-irccat --notice

The topic operations are not supported.

ircbridge-amqp-irccat-tcpserver

Similar to ircbridge-amqp-irccat but running as a TCP server on localhost and port 12345 (defaults, can be overriden using --host and --port).

For -tcpserver, the default target must be supplied beforehand:

ircbridge-amqp-irccat-tcpserver --chan "#bottest"

Now you can send messages using e.g. netcat:

echo "Ahoy" | nc localhost 12345
echo "@user Hey" | nc localhost 12345
echo "#anotherChannel Non-default chan" | nc localhost 12345
echo "#chan,@user Mutliple recepients" | nc localhost 12345

ZRE backend

Uses haskell-zre. Considered experimental.

Cat

Send messages using ircbridge-zre-cat, usage is similar to ircbridge-amqp-cat

Tail

Dump messages received from IRC over ZRE:

ircbridge-zre-tail

or using zrecat

zrecat ircInput
# another terminal
zrecat ircOutput

Raw AMQP

You can use konsum from amqp-utils (nix-shell -p haskellPackages.amqp-utils) to inspect the wire format of the AMQP transport:

Show messages received from IRC

konsum -x ircExchange -r irc.amqp

or snoop messages sent to IRC sent by other clients

konsum -x ircExchange -r amqp.irc

Why there are so many packages?

Sort of an experiment in extreme modularity which allows reusing code without pulling in dependencies not required for certain frontends/backends. For example, amqp doesn't require zre/zeromq, nor cereal dependencies and zre doesn't require amqp, but uses cereal for serialization.

The separation of concerns is also quite nice, for example ircbridge-ircbot-* subpackages use their own set of command line arguments related to IRC network, user information, channels to join while clients like ircbridge-amqp-cat only need to know about a target where to send messages (channel or user).

Related projects

• ircbot used as an IRC frontend
• xnand a bot using ircbridge as its backend (over AMQP)
• irccat inspiration for ircbridge-amqp-irccat