Grinch - The IRC Bot Building Framework

WARNING!

Grinch is a lightly maintained fork of Cinch, which is no longer maintained. It has three primary development goals:

1. To remain (mostly) API compatible with Cinch
2. To fix security and usability bugs
3. To function with currently maintained versions of Ruby

Description

Grinch is an IRC Bot Building Framework for quickly creating IRC bots in Ruby with minimal effort. It provides a simple interface based on plugins and rules. It's as easy as creating a plugin, defining a rule, and watching your profits flourish.

Grinch will do all of the hard work for you, so you can spend time creating cool plugins and extensions to wow your internet peers.

For general support, join #cinch channel on Freenode server (irc://irc.freenode.org/cinch) – but please don't bring any bots.

Installation

RubyGems

You can install the latest Grinch gem using RubyGems

gem install grinch

GitHub

Alternatively you can check out the latest code directly from Github

git clone https://github.com/grinchrb/grinch

Example

Your typical Hello, World application in Grinch would go something like this:

require 'cinch'

bot = Cinch::Bot.new do
  configure do |c|
    c.server = "irc.freenode.org"
    c.channels = ["#cinch-bots"]
  end

  on :message, "hello" do |m|
    m.reply "Hello, #{m.user.nick}"
  end
end

bot.start

More examples can be found in the examples directory.

Features

Documentation

Grinch provides a documented API, which is online for your viewing pleasure here.

Object Oriented

Many IRC bots (and there are, so many) are great, but we see so little of them take advantage of the awesome Object Oriented Interface which most Ruby programmers will have become accustomed to and grown to love.

Well, Grinch uses this functionality to its advantage. Rather than having to pass around a reference to a channel or a user, to another method, which then passes it to another method (by which time you're confused about what's going on) -- Grinch provides an OOP interface for even the simpliest of tasks, making your code simple and easy to comprehend.

Threaded

Unlike a lot of popular IRC frameworks, Grinch is threaded. But wait, don't let that scare you. It's totally easy to grasp.

Each of Grinch's plugins and handlers are executed in their own personal thread. This means the main thread can stay focused on what it does best, providing non-blocking reading and writing to an IRC server. This will prevent your bot from locking up when one of your plugins starts doing some intense operations. Damn that's handy.

Plugins

That's right folks, Grinch provides a modular based plugin system. This is a feature many people have bugged us about for a long time. It's finally here, and it's as awesome as you had hoped!

This system allows you to create feature packed plugins without interfering with any of the Grinch internals. Everything in your plugin is self contained, meaning you can share your favorite plugins among your friends and release a ton of your own plugins for others to use

Want to see the same Hello, World application in plugin form? Sure you do!

require 'cinch'

class Hello
  include Cinch::Plugin

  match "hello"

  def execute(m)
    m.reply "Hello, #{m.user.nick}"
  end
end

bot = Cinch::Bot.new do
  configure do |c|
    c.server = "irc.freenode.org"
    c.channels = ["#cinch-bots"]
    c.plugins.plugins = [Hello]
  end
end

bot.start

Note: Plugins take a default prefix of /^!/ which means the actual match is !hello.

More information can be found in the {Cinch::Plugin} documentation.

Numeric Replies

Do you know what IRC code 401 represents? How about 376? or perhaps 502? Sure you don't (and if you do, you're as geeky as us!). Grinch doesn't expect you to store the entire IRC RFC code set in your head, and rightfully so!

That's exactly why Grinch has a ton of constants representing these numbers so you don't have to remember them. We're so nice.

Pretty Output

Ever get fed up of watching those boring, frankly unreadable lines flicker down your terminal screen whilst your bot is online? Help is at hand! By default, Grinch will colorize all text it sends to a terminal, meaning you get some pretty damn awesome readable coloured text. Grinch also provides a way for your plugins to log custom messages:

on :message, /hello/ do |m|
  debug "Someone said hello"
end

Contribute

Love Grinch? Love Ruby? Love helping? Of course you do! If you feel like Grinch is missing that awesome jaw-dropping feature and you want to be the one to make this magic happen, you can!

Please note that although we very much appreciate all of your efforts, Grinch will not accept patches in aid of Ruby 2.5 compatibility. We have no intention of supporting Ruby versions below 2.5.

Fork the project, implement your awesome feature in its own branch, and send a pull request to one of the Grinch collaborators. We'll be more than happy to check it out.