Bot::BasicBot is a Perl module that provides a really easy, fast and convenient way to build plugin-based IRC bots. I'm playing around with an IRC bot that should assist in continuously deploying projects.

This bot has two main functionalities:

• keep track of continous integration builds
• initiate and keep track of deployments

Right now the bot reads a main configuration file with data about projects, repositories, continuous integration, etc… and answers commands. This is an example:

21:58 <@cosimo> projects-list
21:58 < deployer> auth, geodns, libopera, link, myopera, sso
21:58 <@cosimo> build-status geodns
21:58 < deployer> 97ad24e success cosimo https://git.server/functests/builds/geodns/97ad24e
21:58 <@cosimo> latest-revision sso
21:58 < deployer> 5207cfe, https://git.server/?p=sso.git;a=commit;h=fe977d32e9580551dffe8139396106ba25207cfe
21:59 <@cosimo> build-status auth
21:59 < deployer> 24135 success cosimo https://test.server/functests/builds/auth-unit/24135
21:59 < deployer> 24135.2 success (manual) https://test.server/functests/builds/auth-functional/24135.2

Another functionality of the bot is to detect new builds, and automatically send updates to a given channel, stating the project, the new VCS revision, the committer and a link to the continuous integration test run. Example:

17:22 -deployer:#chan- sso, fe977d3 success cosimo https://test.server/functests/builds/opera-sso/fe977d3

In the future, I also want to command the bot to initiate deployments. Anyway, the problem was that Bot::BasicBot apparently lacked support for sending IRC notices. This caused all the bot messages to interrupt the flow of IRC conversations. Bot::BasicBot has source code also on github, so I just forked it and added support for IRC notices. I just noticed that the author already pulled in the new changes. o/

It will still take years for this to land in Debian, but still… :-)