Log all messages from an IRC channel to a HipChat room

IRC2HipChat is a short Ruby script that uses Cinch to monitor IRC and re-post messages to a dedicated HipChat room using the HipChat API gem.

on :channel do |m|
  msg = "<em>#{m.user.nick}</em>: #{m.message}"
  $hipchat.send('irc2hipchat', msg, { :notify => true, :message_format => 'html' })
end

Background

AppNeta hosts the #appneta channel on Freenode where we offer user support and answer questions. Not as widely known, is that it’s a great place to get direct chat time with the appneta team behind the scenes. On a normal day, we have developers, sales, support and some executives all logged into IRC.

Internally we use HipChat and Dan Riti setup this bot so if someone types ‘helpme’ a notification gets sent to HipChat to ping the team that someone needs help in IRC. It works great.

My problem was that when I forgot to boot LimeChat for Mac, I would log in and have zero chat history. I know I should instead have a dedicated $5 VM running screen and irssi somewhere but I just don’t have the interest and I especially don’t like screen. So what’s the logical next step? Leverage some existing Ruby gems to create an IRC to HipChat Relay in about 25 lines of code.

How it Looks

How to Use It

1. Got Ruby? Checkout rbenv if you don’t.

2. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/pglombardo/IRC2HipChat.git
   

3. Set your environment variables

    # Get your HipChat api token: http://www.hipchat.com/account/api  
    # or even better use a labeled Room Notification Token for better presentation
    echo "export HIPCHAT_API_TOKEN=xxx" >> ~/.bash_profile
   

   Ubuntu Desktop note: Modify your ~/.bashrc instead of ~/.bash_profile.

   Zsh note: Modify your ~/.zshrc file instead of ~/.bash_profile.

4. Configure your HipChat room and IRC channel in config.yml

    HipChatRoom: AppNetaIRCLog    
    IRCChannel: '#appneta'    
    IRCServer: irc.freenode.org    
    IRCNick: irc2hipchat
   

5. Restart your shell so the new environment variables take affect

6. Bundle install

    bundle install
   

7. Start the daemon

    bundle exec rake start
   

Monitoring and Performance

Being AppNeta, we like to monitor performance of all things. If you don’t have a TraceView account, sign up. It’s free.

If you have TraceView setup and installed on your host, IRC2HipChat will automatically report statistics to your dashboard.