This weekend, I found myself helping the Portland Ruby Brigade get setup with a new mailing list and while in our IRC channel (#pdx.rb on freenode), I was reminded that we never setup a bot in the channel. So, I went and tried to get Eggdrop running but didn’t like that the configuration file is a whopping 1342 lines long. Seriously… it’s long. I am a busy person right now and this was instantly a turn-off. So, i looked around for ruby based ones… found a few python ones and found rbot
yes… a ruby-based irc bot!
SVN checked it out… added the few deps and the configuration file…
---irc.nick:pdxrbotcore.address_prefix:-"?"irc.user:pdxrubyserver.name:irc.freenode.netauth.password:******irc.join_channels:-"#pdx.rb"Yes! YAML!
It ran right away…and I was sold. Nice work. (and only about 1330 lines less of configuration!)
So, it was up and running and then I looked at the plugins api. (huge grin)
I’ve added two plugins to the #pdx.rb bot already. One for rubyurl (uses shorturl) and one that shows the last 5 entry titles from the planet rubyonrails site. :-)
We’re already scheming how we’ll make it work with meeting reminders, subversion, and other random fun. I’m quite impressed so far.
Check it out here