It all started when I decided I need to learn Erlang. At the same time I needed a simple ircbot to handle some of the channels I frequent on. These two things put together and I decided to start this project.
The evolution of my knowledge can be best seen from the history of the git commits.
Now that the bot is extensible by plug-ins, and quite stable it's becoming pretty useful. It still needs improvements and is work in progress, but plug-ins can be written for anything.
Patches, help and feature requests can be sent on the github issue tracker. There's a TODO list I keep there too.
The bot is MIT licensed (for no particular reason), it's a very liberal license with no strings, so you can really do whatever you want with it.
First, compile everything:
rebar3 compile
Second, edit and rename the settings.cfg.example file to settings.cfg. Then start
an Erlang REPL shell:
rebar3 shell --start-clean
Once in the Erlang REPL you can start the bot with:
{ok, [{ connection, Settings }]} = file:consult("settings.cfg").
{ok, IrcBot} = ircbot_fsm:start(Settings).
gen_fsm:sync_send_all_state_event(IrcBot, {add_plugin, ircbot_plugin_uptime, []}).
You can make changes to the source code & plugins while the bot is running. Just hit "rebar3 compile" in another terminal and then, if everything is ok, in the Erlang REPL run:
l(ircbot_plugin_uptime).
to reload the ircbot_plugin_uptime uptime module.
or
l(ircbot_fsm).
to reload the ircbot_fsm module.
Erlangs code switching and the gen_fsm/gen_event frameworks will handle all the details to run the new code without even disconnecting.
rebar3 as prod release
An Erlang release will be in _build/prod/rel/ircbot/, an alternative is to get a tarball with rebar3 as prod tar.