IRC News Bot

A Dockerized IRC News Bot written in Python 3

Setting up

Quickstart

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/AlexGustafsson/irc-news-bot
# Enter the directory
cd irc-news-bot
# Run
python3 -m bot.main --server irc.example.com

You can also run the container using Docker, like so:

# Build the image
docker build -t axgn/irc-news-bot:latest .

# Run
docker run axgn/irc-news-bot --server irc.example.com --channel "#random"

Documentation

Running with Docker

docker run axgn/irc-news-bot --server irc.example.com --channel "#random"

The image is stateless and based on Debian Buster and is roughly 964MB in size, due to the dependencies used. While running, the container usually uses 0% of the CPU and roughly 25MB of RAM. During load it uses about 0.20% CPU and while starting about 0.4% on a single core and an unchanged amount of RAM.

To prevent any unforseen events, one can therefore limit the container's resources by using the flags --cpus=0.05 and --memory=64MB which should both leave some head room.

Invoking via IRC

To see help messages send news-bot: help in the channel where the bot lives.

Each supported commands follows the news-bot: <command> <country> <language> [parameters].

Supported commands are: topic for viewing news topics such as business, location for viewing news for a location such as Karlskrona and search for searching for news using a query such as security -TikTok.

Contributing

Any contribution is welcome. If you're not able to code it yourself, perhaps someone else is - so post an issue if there's anything on your mind.

Development

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/AlexGustafsson/irc-news-bot

Setup a virtual environment and dependencies:

make setup

Write code and commit it.

Follow the conventions enforced:

make static-analysis

Test the project:

make test

Disclaimer

Although the project is very capable, it is not built with production in mind. Therefore there might be complications when trying to use the bot for large-scale projects meant for the public. The bot was created to easily send news in IRC channels and as such it might not promote best practices nor be performant.