kameloso 1.0.0-beta.3

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. Ideas welcome.

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

Use on networks without services may be difficult, since the bot identifies people by their services (NickServ/Q/AuthServ/...) account names. As such you will probably want to register and reserve nicknames for both yourself and the bot, where available.

Current functionality includes:

• bedazzling coloured terminal output like it's the 90s
• 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 (notes on connecting below)
• sed-replacement of the last message sent (s/this/that/ substitution)
• piping text from the terminal to the server
• mIRC colour coding and text effects (bold, underlined, ...), translated into Bash formatting
• SASL authentication (plain)

Windows

There are a few Windows caveats.

• Web URL lookup, including the bash.org quotes 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. As such, such functionality is disabled on Windows by default.
• Terminal colours may also not work, depending on your version of Windows and likely your terminal font. Unsure of how to enable this. By default it will compile on Windows with colours disabled, but they can be enabled by specifying a different build configuration.

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 web-related plugins to work.

Downloading

GitHub offers downloads in ZIP format, but it's easier to use git and clone the repository 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. 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 for them to run.

$ 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 the program in one go.

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 vanilla
• cygwin, equals colours but with extra code needed for running it under the default Cygwin terminal (mintty, which can display colours)

You can specify which to build with the -c switch.

$ dub build -b release -c vanilla

How to use

The bot needs the services account name of the administrator of the bot, and/or one or more home channels to operate in. It cannot work without having at least one of the two. The hardcoded defaults contain neither, 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 an old configuration file and you notice missing options, such as plugin-specific settings, just run it with --writeconfig again and your file should be updated with all entries. There are many more plugin-specific and less important options available than what is displayed at program start.

The colours 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 and enter your administrators' account names in the configuration file before it will 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 | !say herp
kameloso | herp
     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 #thischannel :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 different from authPassword in that it is supplied very early during login/registration to even allow you to connect, 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.

TODO

(But not neccessarily for 1.0.0)

• pipedream: DCC
• pipedream two: ncurses
• blacklists; by mask, by account?
• optional formatting in IRC output? (later)
• channel-split notes (later)
• notes to always trigger on joins if not present when note placed, only on activity if present? (later)
• update wiki
• documentation run; examples, params
• try github.io ddoc hosting? guide in forums

Built With

• D
• dub
• dlang-requests
• arsd

License

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

Acknowledgments

• 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