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.
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.
.
..: Copyright 2011-2017 by Mikael Roos (mos@dbwebb.se)