blinsay / gesture

an irc bot that does helpful things

What is this?

• gesture is an irc bot.
• gesture is an descendent of the allmighty jester.
• gesture runs on a plugin structure, still under construction, kinda like hubot.

How do I plugin?

For better or worse, Plugins are just packages with a func Create(bot *core.Gobot) method. There is no interface you should be defining. Within that create method, a plugin is allowed to do anything it likes to the bot. Check out the Gobot type for things you can do to your 'bot.

For example, this plugin inserts BEES into your IRC channel everytime someone types the word "bees" (or "beeeees" or "beeeeeeeeees" and so on).

# plugin/bees/bees.go

package bees

import (
	"github.com/collinvandyck/gesture/core"
)

func Create(bot *core.Gobot, config map[string]interface{}){
	bot.ListenFor("bee(e*)s", func(msg core.Message, matches []string) error {
		msg.Send("http://i.imgur.com/qrLEV.gif")
		return nil
	})
}

How do I configure?

Gesture uses the following struct for configuration:

type Config struct {
     DisableFloodProtection bool
     BotName                string
     Hostname               string
     SSL                    bool
     Channels               []string
     Plugins                map[string]map[string]interface{}
} 

Plugin configuration deserves a special mention. Plugin configuration is a map of plugin names to plugin configuration maps. A plugin defines what it expects out of a plugin configuration map (since it's a map[string]interface{}, feel free to do whatever you please!).

Building your Robot

Quickly

Gesture comes loaded with a build_bot tool that generates an IRC-bot script for you based on the same JSON configuration file that your bot will load.

Install it with

go install github.com/collinvandyck/gesture/build_bot

build_bot expects that your plugin names will be the full import path of the plugin package, and will generate you a script that includes all of the plugins listed in your configuration. Unfortunately, even plugins that don't need to be configured should be listed.

An example configuration that you want to use build_bot on might look like:

{
	"botname": "gesture",
	"hostname": "irc.freenode.net",
	"ssl": true,
	"channels": ["#lolgesture"],
	"plugins": {
  "github.com/collinvandyck/gesture/plugin/gis": {},
		"github.com/collinvandyck/gesture/plugin/graphite": {
			"prefix": "myprefix"
		},
		"github.com/collinvandyck/gesture/plugin/youtube": {
			"results": 3
		},
  "code.google.com/p/potato_chips_for_golang": {
    "flavor": "salt_and_vinegar"
  }
	}
}

build_bot dumps it's results to standard output and leaves you to save that to a file and modify it however you please. When you're ready to run your bot, go build or go run it the usual way.

NOTE: build_bot does no validation of your config file because you have to run it through the Go compiler yourself. If something's up with the output of build_bot, check that you have the proper packages listed as the names of your plugins.

With Care

The build_bot script uses Go templates to do it's magic. Check out the script for more detail on how to construct a template.

Please also feel free to ignore build_bot and write your own Gesture script!