sl/plan9

date: 2018-03-10 layout: post title: How to write an IRC bot

tags: [irc, slack]

My disdain for Slack and many other Silicon Valley chat clients is well known, as is my undying love for IRC. With Slack making the news lately after their recent decision to disable the IRC and XMPP gateways in a classic Embrace Extend Extinguish move, they’ve been on my mind and I feel like writing about them more. Let’s compare writing a bot for Slack with writing an IRC bot.

First of all, let’s summarize the process for making a Slack bot. Full details are available in their documentation. The basic steps are:

  1. Create a Slack account and “workspace” to host the bot (you may have already done this step). On the free plan you can have up to 10 “integrations” (aka bots). This includes all of the plug-n-play bots Slack can set up for you, so make sure you factor that into your count. Otherwise you’ll be heading to the pricing page and making a case to whoever runs your budget.
  2. Create a “Slack app” through their web portal. The app will be tied to the company you work with now, and if you get fired you will lose the app. Make sure you make a separate organization if this is a concern!
  3. The recommended approach from here is to set up subscriptions to the “Event API”, which involves standing up a web server (with working SSL) on a consistent IP address (and don’t forget to open up the firewall) to receive incoming notifications from Slack. You’ll need to handle a proprietary challenge to verify your messages via some HTTP requests coming from Slack which gives you info to put into HTTP headers of your outgoing requests. The Slack docs refer to this completion of this process as “triumphant success”.
  4. Receive some JSON in a proprietary format via your HTTP server and use some more proprietary HTTP APIs to respond to it.

Alternatively, instead of steps 3 and 4 you can use the “Real Time Messaging” API, which is a websocket-based protocol that starts with an HTTP request to Slack’s authentication endpoint, then a follow-up HTTP request to open the WebSocket connection. Then you set up events in a similar fashion. Refer to the complicated table in the documentation breaking down which events work through which API.

Alright, so that’s the Slack way. How does the IRC way compare? IRC is an open standard, so to learn about it I can just read RFC 1459, which on my system is conveniently waiting to be read at /usr/share/doc/rfc/txt/rfc1459.txt. This means I can just read it locally, offline, in the text editor of my choice, rather than on some annoying website that calls authentication a “triumphant success” and complains about JavaScript being disabled.

You don’t have to read it right now, though. I can give you a summary here, like I gave for Slack. Let’s start by not writing a bot at all - let’s just manually throw some bits in the general direction of Freenode. Install netcat and run nc irc.freenode.net 6667, then type this into your terminal:

NICK joebloe USER joebloe 0.0.0.0 joe :Joe Bloe

Hey, presto, you’re connected to IRC! Type this in to join a channel:

JOIN #cmpwn

Then type this to say hello:

PRIVMSG #cmpwn :Hi SirCmpwn, I'm here from your blog!

IRC is one of the simplest protocols out there, and it’s dead easy to write a bot for it. If your programming language can open a TCP socket (it can), then you can use it to write an IRC bot in 2 minutes, flat. That’s not even to mention that there are IRC client libraries available for every programming language on every platform ever - I even wrote one myself! In fact, that guy is probably the fifth or sixth IRC library I’ve written. They’re so easy to write that I’ve lost count.

Slack is a walled garden. Their proprietary API is defined by them and only implemented by them. They can and will shut off parts you depend on (like the IRC+XMPP gateways that were just shut down). IRC is over 20 years old and software written for it then still works now. It’s implemented by hundreds of clients, servers, and bots. Your CI supports it and GitHub can send commit notifications to it. It’s ubiquitous and free. Use it!