Marvin, an IRC bot

Get a quick start by checking out the main script main.py and read on how to contribute.

Contribute

Create your own virtual environment, install the local devevelopment environment and run the script.

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ alias activate='. .venv/bin/activate'
$ activate
$ make install-tools
$ make test
$ python3 main.py
$ deactivate

Check main.py for more details (should be moved to pydoc or other proper documentation like here in this README...).

History

The python script, irc2phpbb.py, is a implementation of an irc bot. The bot can answer simple questions and some more advanced features such as presenting the weather by scraping an external website and keeping track of forum posts and posting new posts to the channel. The bot is reading incoming entries from a directory and external scripts may put information there that should be displayed in the irc-channel.

The PHP-script aggregate.php is used to log in to the forum to get credentials to view the latest posts through rss. A SQLite database is used to keep track on which posts have been displayed in the irc-channel.

The basic code is from: http://osix.net/modules/article/?id=780 and http://oreilly.com/pub/h/1968. From there its further developed and customized to fit the target forum and target irc-channel.

The rfc for the irc protocol is quite helpful: http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/rfc/

/Mikael Roos (mos@dbwebb.se)

Customized for dbwebb.se

The bot is created for use in irc://irc.bsnet.se/#db-o-webb which is an irc channel for teaching & learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL and Unix. The forum is http://dbwebb.se/forum.

This means that the code contains some settings to work in that environment and can therefore not just be cloned and installed. Modifications are needed. The script may anyhow be useful as a study object for those in need of similar functionality.

Using feedparser to get RSS-feeds

The bot uses the feedparser python lib to parse RSS feeds, for example when getting the latest post to the forum. You'll have to download and install the lib yourself.

Using BeautifulSoup to scrape web-pages

The bot uses the python lib BeautifulSoup to scrape information from webpages. Just to show it off how it's done but it can of course be made into some useful stuff. You'll have to download and install the lib yourself.

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Using PHP to keep track on recent posts

The file aggregate.php uses magpierss (http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/) to aggregate feeds from several places and while discovering new entries it stores messages in the directory incoming where Marvin (the bot) is looking, when finding a file its content will be posted to the irc-channel by the bot. You'll have to download and unpack the library in the 'magpierss' folder. You also need to create the folder 'incoming' and create the database file that will be used. The database file should be named db.sqlite and reside in the same folder as aggregate.php. The table needed in the database looks like this:

CREATE TABLE aggregate (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, feed text, key text UNIQUE);

Run aggregate.php from crontab with regular intervals, for example each 5 minute.

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php /home/mos/git/irc2phpbb/aggregate.php

The id of the feed items are stored in a SQLite database to avoid duplicates being posted.