Greenman

Greenman is a middleware library for node.js IRC bots built on node-irc 0.3.x. Greenman is to node-irc what connect is to http.Server. It is not an IRC bot in itself, but provides conveniences in building them.

Installation

npm install greenman

Create a bot

Instantiate a bot by providing a nick that will identify the bot. The instance of Bot is what the middleware will be added to, and eventually connected to an IRC server.

var Bot = require("greenman").Bot;
 
var bot = new Bot("nick");

Middleware

Middleware are functions that handle incoming IRC messages, and then call the next middleware in the stack. They will be called in the order they were added to the bot, but only as long as a each middleware calls next(...). Stacks exist per IRC event, and the middleware functions in those stacks will take arguments specific to that event. Since Greenman is built on node-irc, the events and callback arguments are exactly the same as documented here. The next function lets you pass in the parameters that downstream middleware will use.

Here's an example middleware to trim messages:

bot.use("message", function(from, to, text, message, next) {
  next(from, to, text.trim(), message);
});

Ignoring nicks from a blacklist. Because next is not called when the nick is in the blacklist, downstream middleware will never see the message: (CoffeeScript)

greenman.use "message", (from, to, text, message, next) ->
  if from not in config.blacklist
    next from, to, text, message

Helper middleware

Suppose you want to handle an event and you know you would always call next without modifying its arguments. Greenman provides some conveniences for common middleware use cases:

//no need to use the 'message' argument if you don't need it
bot.event("join", function(channel, nick) {
  console.log(nick + " joined channel " + channel);
  //next(...) will be called for you
});

You can use shorthand for these common events: (CoffeeScript)

# Handle "message" event to channels only (no private messages) 
bot.msg (nick, channel, text) ->
  bot.say channel, "Keep it quiet, #{nick}!"
 
# Handle messages to a channel if it matches a pattern 
bot.msg /I like (.+)/i, (nick, channel, match) ->
  bot.say channel, "I like #{match[1]} too!"
 
# Handle private messages sent to the bot 
bot.pm (nick, text) ->
  bot.say nick, "Cool story, bro."
 
# Private messages with a pattern 
bot.pm /!secret (.+)/i, (nick, match) ->
  secrets.put match[1]
  bot.say nick, "Your secret's safe with me!"
 
# Messages sent to channels *or* privately to the bot in a PM 
# Can also be called without a regex like the others 
bot.any /^!echo (.+)$/i, (from, to, match) ->
  # A special version of say that responds in the context the message was received 
  bot.reply from, to, match[1]

Say and reply

The first argument of bot.say is the recipient, be it a #channel or a nick, and the second is the text you want to send. New from node-irc is bot.reply. If to is equal to the bot's nick, then the message was a private message. Otherwise it is a message sent to a channel the bot is in. Replying takes into account the nick of the bot and sends the response to the right place. It also prefixes the message with the recipients name, so the below example would actually say "jane: Hello, world!" if the original sender was "jane".

bot.any(function(from, to, text) {
  bot.reply(from, to, "Hello, world!");
});

Say and reply have no effect until connect has been called:

Connecting to an IRC server

Connecting with Greenman is the same as connecting with node-irc. Just pass in the server and options, because the bot already knows the nick you constructed it with.

bot.connect("irc.example.com", {
  floodProtection: true,
  channels: [
    "#mychannel"
  ]
});

And that's it! Your bot should be up and running.

Getting the IRC client

You might need to use the underlying IRC client to do some grunt work. You can get the node-irc client by calling getClient(). As a heads up, this will return null until connect has been called.

var client = bot.getClient();
 
client.join("#mychannel", "password");

Alternatives

Need something different? Check out oftn-bot and Jerk :)

Contributing

Cloning and running tests

git clone [e-mail]:csauve/node-greenman.git
npm install
npm test

Pull requests happily accepted.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.