kameloso ~gdc-ice

kameloso

kameloso sits and listens in the channels you specify and reacts to events, like bots generally do.

Features are added as plugins, written as D modules. A variety comes bundled but it's very easy to write your own. API documentation is available online. Any and all ideas welcome.

Included is a framework that works with the majority of server networks. IRC is standardised but servers still come in many flavours, where some outright conflict with others. If something doesn't immediately work it's most often a case of specialcasing for that particular IRC network or server daemon.

Current functionality includes:

• bedazzling coloured terminal output like it's the 90s
• automatic mode sets (eg. auto +o for op)
• user quotes service
• saving notes to offline users that get played back when they come online
• seen plugin; reporting when a user was last seen, written as a rough tutorial and a simple example of how plugins work
• looking up titles of pasted web URLs
• Reddit post lookup
• bash.org quoting
• Twitch events; simple Twitch chatbot is now easy (see notes on connecting below)
• sed-replacement of the last message sent (s/this/that/ substitution)
• piping text from the terminal to the server (Posix-like only)
• mIRC colour coding and text effects (bold, underlined, ...), translated into Bash terminal formatting
• SASL authentication (plain)

Current limitations:

• building may segfault the dmd compiler if compiling in plain or release modes with dmd up to version 2.079.0; in some cases only debug works (bug #18026); fixed in 2.079.1?
• some plugins don't yet differentiate between different home channels if there is more than one
• quirky IRC server daemons that haven't been tested against can exhibit weird behaviour when parsing goes awry (need concrete examples to fix, please report abnormalities)

Use on networks without services may be difficult, since the bot identifies people by their services (NickServ/Q/AuthServ/...) account names. You will probably want to register yourself with such, where available.

Testing is mainly done on freenode, so support and coverage is best there.

Table of contents

• News
• Getting started
  • Prerequisites
  • Downloading
  • Compiling
    • Windows
• How to use
  • Twitch
  • Use as a library
• Roadmap
• Built with
  • License
  • Acknowledgements

News

• Readme now has a news section!
• segfault seems gone in 2.079.1?
• experimental automodes plugin, please test
• the printer plugin can now save logs to disk. Regenerate your configuration file and enable it with saveLogs set to true. It can either write lines as they are received, or buffer writes to write with a cadence of once every PING, configured with bufferedWrites. By default only homes are logged; configurable with the logAllChannels knob. Needs testing and feedback
• direct imgur links are now rewritten (to the non-direct HTML page) so we can get a meaningful page title, like stale YouTube ones are
• remember to dub upgrade to get a fresh dlang-requests (~>0.7.0)
• all* (non-service) plugins can now be toggled as enabled or disabled in the configuration file. Regenerate it to get the configuration file entries
• New whitelist/blacklist handling needs testing
• plugins can now mix in the slimmer MinimalAuthentification mixin rather than the full UserAwareness if they don't need ChannelAwareness and/or access to the state.users array

Getting started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes, as well as general use.

Prerequisites

You need a D compiler and the official dub package manager. There are three compilers available; see here for an overview.

kameloso can be built using the reference compiler dmd and the LLVM-based ldc, but the GCC-based gdc comes with a version of the standard library that is too old, at time of writing.

It's possible to build it manually without dub, but it is non-trivial if you want the web-related plugins to work.

Downloading

GitHub offers downloads in ZIP format, but it's arguably easier to use git and clone a copy of the source that way.

$ git clone https://github.com/zorael/kameloso.git
$ cd kameloso

Compiling

$ dub build

This will compile it in the default debug build type, which adds some extra code and debugging symbols.

You can automatically strip these and add some optimisations by building it in release mode with dub build -b release. Mind that build times will increase. Refer to the output of dub build --help for more build types.

Unit tests are built into the language, but you need to compile the project in unittest mode to include them.

$ dub build -b unittest

The tests are run at the start of the program, not during compilation. You can use the shorthand dub test to compile with tests and run them in one go. unittest builds will only run the unit tests and immediately exit.

The available build configurations are:

• vanilla, builds without any specific extras
• colours, compiles in terminal colours
• web, compiles in plugins with web lookup (webtitles, reddit and bashquotes)
• colours+web, includes both of the above
• posix, default on Posix-like systems, equals colours+web
• windows, default on Windows, equals web
• cygwin, equals colours+web but with extra code needed for running it under the default Cygwin terminal (mintty)

You can specify which to compile with the -c switch. Not supplying one will make it build the default for your operating system.

$ dub build -b release -c cygwin

Windows

There are a few Windows caveats.

• Web URL lookup, including the web titles and Reddit plugins, may not work out of the box with secure HTTPS connections, due to the default installation of dlang-requests not finding the correct libraries. Unsure of how to fix this. Normal HTTP access should work fine.
• Terminal colours may also not work, depending on your version of Windows and likely your terminal font. Unsure of how to enable this.
• Use in Cygwin terminals without compiling the aforementioned cygwin build configuration will be unpleasant. Normal cmd and Powershell consoles are not affected.

How to use

The bot needs the services account name of the administrator(s) of the bot, and/or one or more home channels to operate in. It cannot work without having at least one of the two, so you need to create and edit a configuration file before starting.

$ ./kameloso --writeconfig

Open the new kameloso.conf in a text editor and fill in the fields.

If you have compiled in colours, they may be hard to see and the text difficult to read if you have a bright terminal background. If so, make sure to pass the --bright argument, and/or modify the configuration file; brightTerminal under [Core]. The bot uses the entire range of 8-colour ANSI, so if one or more colours are too dark or bright even with the right brightTerminal setting, please see to your terminal appearance settings. This is not uncommon, especially with backgrounds that are not fully black or white. (read: Monokai, Breeze, Solaris, ...)

Once the bot has joined a channel it's ready. Mind that you need to authorise yourself with any services (with an account listed as an adminisrator in the configuration file) to make it listen to anything you do. Before allowing anyone to trigger any functionality it will look them up and compare their accounts with its internal whitelists.

     you joined #channel
kameloso sets mode +o you
     you | !say herp
kameloso | herp
     you | s/herp/actually blarp/
kameloso | you | actually blarp
     you | !8ball
kameloso | It is decidedly so
     you | !addquote you This is a quote
kameloso | Quote saved. (1 on record)
     you | !quote you
kameloso | you | This is a quote
     you | !note OfflinePerson Why so offline?
kameloso | Note added.
     you | !seen OfflinePerson
kameloso | I last saw OfflinePerson 1 hour and 34 minutes ago.
     you | kameloso: sudo PRIVMSG #channel :this is a raw IRC command
kameloso | this is a raw IRC command
     you | !bash 85514
kameloso | <Reverend> IRC is just multiplayer notepad.
     you | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
kameloso | [youtube.com] Danish language
     you | !reddit https://dlang.org/blog/2018/01/04/dmd-2-078-0-has-been-released/
kameloso | Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7o2tcw/dmd_20780_has_been_released

Send help to the bot in a private query message for a summary of available bot commands, and help [plugin] [command] for a brief description of a specific one. Mind that commands defined as regular expressions will not be shown, due to technical reasons.

The prefix character (here "!") is configurable; refer to your generated configuration file. Common alternatives are . and ~, making it .note and ~quote respectively.

[Core]
prefix              !

It can technically be any string and not just one character. Enquote it if you want any spaces as part of the prefix token, like "please ".

Twitch

To connect to Twitch servers you must supply an OAuth token. Generate one here, then add it to your kameloso.conf in the pass field.

[IRCBot]
nickname            twitchaccount
pass                oauth:the50letteroauthstringgoeshere
homes               #twitchaccount
channels            #streamer1,#streamer2,#streamer3

[IRCServer]
address             irc.chat.twitch.tv
port                6667

pass is not the same as authPassword. It is supplied very early during login (or registration) to even allow you to connect, even before negotiating username and nickname, which is otherwise the very first thing to happen. authPassword is something that is sent to services after registration is finished and you have successfully logged onto the server. (In the case of SASL authentication, authPassword is used during late registration.)

Mind that a full Twitch bot cannot be implemented as an IRC client.

Use as a library

The IRC server string-parsing modules are largely decoupled from the rest of the program, needing only some helper modules.

• irc.d
• ircdefs.d
• string.d
• meld.d

The big exception is one function that warns the user of abnormalities after parsing, which uses a Logger to inform the user when something seems wrong. The Logger in turn imports more. Comment the version = PostParseSanityCheck at the top of irc.d to opt out of these messages and remove this dependency.

Roadmap

• pipedream: DCC
• pipedream two: ncurses
• optional formatting in IRC output? (later if at all)
• notes triggers? (later)
• seen doing what? channel-split? IRCEvent-based? (later)
• update wiki!
• set up a real configuration home like ~/.kameloso? what of Windows?
• refresh `seen.d'

Built with

• D
• dub
• dlang-requests
• arsd

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license - see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgements

• kameloso for obvious reasons
• README.md template gist
• ikod for dlang-requests making the web-related plugins possible
• Adam D. Ruppe for arsd, extending web functionality
• #d on Freenode for always answering questions
• IRC Definition Files and #ircdocs on Freenode for their excellent resource pages