Design principles

This bot is based on a couple of design criteriums:

• There needs to be a loose coupling between the bot and the plugins
• Fine-grained ACLs up to the command level need to be possible

Loose coupling

Loose coupling of the bot will allow rapid plugin development without involving the bot. Furthermore, since the bots do not depend on any IRC semantics, it is possible to run the bot outside of the context of the bot. The link between the plugins and the bot is provided by mqtt topics.

Fine-grained ACLs

In order to implement some form of access-control, ACLs need to be in place. This need to be on the hostmask/command granularity, using roles, principals and subjects.

Configuration

The configuration settings for this bot can be set in three different ways: commandline arguments, environment variables and yaml-based configuration. The precedence is environment > commandline > yaml. The following options are available:

yaml	argument	envvar	description	default value
server	-server	IRCBOT_SERVER	Which server to connect to	localhost:6667
use_tls	-usetls	IRCBOT_USETLS	Use TLS to connect to the server	false
verify_tls	-verifytls	IRCBOT_VERIFYTLS	Verify TLS server certificate	true
channel	-channel	IRCBOT_CHANNEL	Default channel to join	#example
nickname	-nickname	IRCBOT_NICKNAME	Nickname to use	ircbot
realname	-realname	IRCBOT_REALNAME	Realname to use	ircbot
owner	-owner	IRCBOT_OWNER	Hostmask of the owner	unset
command_prefix	-commandprefix	IRCBOT_COMMANDPREFIX	Commandprefix to use	!
db_path	-dbpath	IRCBOT_DBPATH	Path to the database	./jaken.db
plugin_path	-pluginpath	IRCBOT_PLUGINPATH	Path to the plugins	./plugins

Access control

This bot features fine-grained RBAC with a command-level granularity. Every command can be bound to a role, and users can get permissions per role. By default, this works on the command level, but it is possible to bind multiple commands to a single role. During intialization of the bot, one default role is created for admin users and and the user management commands are bound to this role.

Built-in commands

In order to make the bot work, it includes several commands by itself, a list of these can be found below

command	role	description
whoami	member	Display how you are recognized by the bot
test	member	Test if you can talk with the bot
help	member	Get some info to get you started
commands	member	List all commands that are available to you
meet	admin	Introduce a new user to the bot. This will cause the bot to perform a whois lookup for this user, and store the corresponding hostmask into the database
forget	admin	Remove a user from the bot. This will delete all hostmasks of users matching the nickname
add-role	admin	Define a new role
del-role	admin	Remove a role
list-roles	admin	List all available roles
add-perm	admin	Grants a user permission to a role
del-perm	admin	Revokes a permission from a user
list-perms	admin	List all roles for a user. By default the permissions for the calling user will be shown. By specifying <nickname> you can lookup the permissions for another user.

Mqtt topics

Several topics are available for communication to/from the bot, as can be seen in the table below. Examples for how to use this can be found underneath the plugins directory,

topic	direction	description
from/irc/(channel)/(nickname)/message	towards plugin	Raw feed of messages in (channel)
from/irc/(channel)/(nickname)/(command)	towards plugin	Listen in a channel for (ControlChar)(command)
to/irc/(channel)/privmsg	towards bot	Send reply in (channel) via PRIVMSG
to/irc/(channel)/notice	towards bot	Send reply in (channel) via NOTICE
to/irc/(channel)/topic	towards bot	Sets TOPIC for (channel)

Plugin development guidelines

Plugins can be written in any language, as long as they communicate via the mqtt topics that are available.

Upcoming features

• Port some plugins
• Alias support
• sqlite3 -> add transactions and concurrency limits
• Possibility to join multiple channels