lurklite

luk3yx's "lightweight™" IRC and Discord bot (excluding commands).

Official bot

If you can't or don't want to run your own bot, you can request that the official bot be added to your channel. The official bot is on a few IRC networks, most notably Libera Chat and xeroxIRC. PM luk3yx there if you want the bot on an IRC channel you own. Note that this IRC bot is running Sopel and not lurklite, hopefully I'll release the API shim it uses sometime.

Alternatively, if you use Discord, you can use https://bit.ly/lurkdiscord to add lurklite (without any permissions) to your Discord guild/server.

Installation

To install lurklite, you can simply install it with pipx install lurklite. After installation, you should be able to run lurklite.

Config file

The lurklite config file has a format similar to ini files. It must have a [core] section with the following values:

[core]
# The tempcmd db, commands added with .tempcmd are stored here.
# If you have msgpack installed, this database will be slightly smaller and
#   faster to read/write to/from.
command_db = /path/to/tempcmd/database

# The bot's command prefix.
prefix     = .

# (Optional) A list of hostmasks to ignore.
# ignored  = *!*@*/bot/*, baduser!*@*

# (Optional) Disable "Yay!" and "Ouch." replies.
# disable_yay  = false
# disable_ouch = false

Connecting to IRC servers

You can then create sections starting with irc. (for example irc.mynetwork) to connect to IRC servers:

[irc.mynetwork]
ip   = irc.example.com
port = 6697
nick = testbot
channels = #botwar,#other-channel

# List of hostmasks to ignore (optional)
# ignored = *!*@*/bot/*, *!*sopel*@*

# List of hostnames for admins
# admins = unaffiliated/user

The following optional values may be added to the above config, and are sent directly to miniirc:

connect_modes = +g
ident         = ident
ns_identity   = username password
quit_message  = Quit message
realname      = realname
ssl           = true

Connecting to Matrix servers

You can connect to Matrix (using miniirc_matrix) with this config section:

[matrix]
homeserver = example.com
token = your-matrix-token
admins = @yourusername:example.com

Obtaining a token is currently not very straightforward. You can use the following Python code. Note that if you execute this in an interactive Python shell it will likely save both the username and password in its history file.

import miniirc_matrix
print(miniirc_matrix.login('example.com', 'botusername', 'password'))

The bot will automatically accept invites from admins.

Connecting to Discord servers

You can also connect to Discord servers (via miniirc_discord) with the following config section:

[discord]
# You need miniirc_discord installed for this to work.
token    = your-discord-token

# Using user IDs instead of username#discriminator improves security.
# admins = username#1234, userid

You can only have one Discord connection per bot process, and lurklite will use slightly more RAM if [discord] exists, as miniirc_discord will be imported (and if you don't specify a Discord bot token, miniirc_discord won't be imported).

Storing the command database in an ASCII-safe format.

If you have the habit of opening and modifying commands.db in a text editor, it might be a good idea to store it with JSON by adding the following to your configuration file:

[tempcmds]
db_format = json

Note that this will very slightly degrade performance and increase the size, however this should be a negligible amount for most purposes.

Creating commands

Once your bot has connected to IRC (or Discord), you can use tempcmd to create (permanent) commands. You can either do .tempcmd <command> <type> <code> to add a tempcmd with a set type, or .tempcmd <command> <code> to auto-detect the type (as long as the first word in <code> is not a valid type).

For now, tempcmds.py has a list of code types/formats and what they do.

To delete commands, you can use tempcmd del/delete/remove <command>. To create a command called del, delete or remove, you can prepend your bot's prefix to the command name.

Creating non-"tempcmd" commands

If you want more fine-grained control over a command, you can add a custom_cmds line to the [core] section of config.ini. The file specified will be loaded and can define more powerful commands, for example:

# A simple version command
# The "requires_admin" parameter is optional and defaults to False.
@register_command('version', requires_admin=False)
def version_command(irc, hostmask, is_admin, args):
    # irc: The miniirc.IRC (or miniirc_discord.Discord) object.
    # hostmask: The hostmask tuple, mostly from miniirc. Note that relayed
    #   messages (for example "<relayed_user> test") will have a hostmask
    #   similar to ('relayed_user@relay_bot', 'relay_bot_ident',
    #       'relay.bot.host/relayed/relayed_user').
    # is_admin: Either `False` or a string with the admin match (for example
    #   a hostmask or Discord tag.
    # args: ["#channel", "command parameters"]
    #   For PMs, "#channel" will be the sender (hostmask[0]).

    irc.msg(args[0], miniirc.version)

You do not have to import anything to get register_command.

If custom_cmds is a directory, all .py files in that directory will be loaded. If you want your custom commands file/directory in lurklite's source directory, you can name it custom_cmds.py (or, for directories, custom_cmds or commands) to make git ignore it.

Built-in commands

lurklite has the following built-in commands:

• reboot: Reboot the bot.
• tempcmd: Create and delete commands.
• version: Display the miniirc version and quit.

Migrating from very old versions of lurklite

Older versions of lurklite (pre-v0.1.0) had a tempcmds.db created using repr(). This is slow(-ish) and inefficient, so is no longer supported. If you still have a pre-v0.1.0 tempcmds.db, you can run tempcmds_migrate.py to update it to the new msgpack/JSON format.