SimpleBot

by Joseph Huckaby

Published on 19 January, 2014

SimpleBot is an easy-to-install and easy-to-use general purpose IRC bot, written in Perl. It is built on the awesome Bot::BasicBot framework.

Features at a glance:

Single-command install on most flavors of Linux
Alarm clock, countdown to date/time, timer
Google Calendar integration with countdown to events
Google Search commands for searching and defining terms
Weather system for current conditions and 5-day forecast
Twitter integration for automatically following or retweeting
Custom topic system for defining a set of columns and a divider
FAQ system to define custom commands that emit text
Scoreboard system for awarding points to users
Poll system with user voting
Calculator and unit converter
Version check and self-upgrade commands
Network utilities such as ping, DNS lookup, URL sniff
Custom greetings and goodbyes for users
Insult generator (have the bot insult a user)
Custom access level control for all commands (voice, half, op, etc.)
Custom activator symbols (exclamation point, etc.)
Configuration editing system from within IRC
Administrative commands including nick, join, restart, quit, upgrade, etc.
Puppet mode (have the bot say anything in any channel, sent from a PM)
Integrated help text for all commands
Database implemented with simple JSON files on disk

Single-Command Install

To install SimpleBot, execute this command as root on your server:

curl -s "http://pixlcore.com/software/simplebot/install-latest-stable.txt" | bash

Or, if you don't have curl, you can use wget:

wget -O - "http://pixlcore.com/software/simplebot/install-latest-stable.txt" | bash

This will install the latest stable version of SimpleBot. Change the word “stable” to “dev” to install the development branch. This single command installer should work fine on any modern Linux RedHat (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS) or Debian (Ubuntu) operating system. Basically, anything that has “yum” or “apt-get” should be happy. See the manual installation instructions for other OSes, or if the single-command installer doesn't work for you.

After installation, you will be provided instructions for connecting to a server for the first time. If you are running our sister product, SimpleIRC, on the same server as SimpleBot, this will be detected and everything automatically set up and connected for you.

Open Source

SimpleBot is open source, and available on GitHub:

https://github.com/jhuckaby/simplebot

SimpleBot relies on the following non-core Perl modules, which are automatically installed, along with their prerequisites, using cpanm:

POE
Bot::BasicBot
JSON::XS
LWP::UserAgent
URI::Escape
HTTP::Date
DateTime
DateTime::TimeZone
DateTime::TimeZone::Alias
Net::Twitter::Lite
Net::Ping::External
Math::Units

Plugin APIs

The bot's Weather Plugin uses a free API available from WorldWeatherOnline.com. You will need to sign up for a free account and get an API Key in order to use this Plugin. For instructions, type !help weather in a channel where the bot is, or /msg simplebot help weather on the IRC console.

The bot's Twitter Plugin uses the free Twitter API v1.1. For this, you will need to sign up for a Twitter account, and create a free “application” on dev.twitter.com, in order to get API keys and use the Plugin. For instructions, type !help twitter in a channel where the bot is, or /msg simplebot help twitter on the IRC console.

MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.