MQTTBot

MQTTBot is a IRC-to-MQTT and MQTT-to-IRC "bridge". MQTTBot (as you can guess from the name) is an IRC bot which is connected to a MQTT broker and can publish and subscribe to the broker. So you can forward the IRC messages to your favourite MQTT topics or you can post received MQTT messages to the IRC chat.

Why would I want a IRC-MQTT bridge?

Admit it, you always wanted to chat with your MQTT enabled devices in an IRC chat. Your devices are now able to chat with humans. Internet of Things just got real.

Seriously?

Perhaps. This bot was written out of curiosity (I have never written an IRC bot before) and fun. There are however some interesting use cases which can be implemented with that bot. You could for instance use this bot to bridge all messages of an IRC channel to a MQTT broker and your Arduino (which subscribes to the said broker) beeps whenever your name was mentioned in the IRC chat.

Another interesting use case could be to send messages you (and hopefully all other people in the channel) care about to the IRC chat. It is recommended that you use a MQTT broker which implements a sophisticated security concept for topics to avoid abuse or spamming. HiveMQ offers such a functionality.

Structure

IRC to MQTT

The IRC Bot publishes all messages from IRC channels to MQTT topics. Since the # character cannot be used in MQTT topic names, it is replaced by % in topic names by default.

The root mapping of IRC chats to MQTT topics is the following:

$IRC_PREFIX/$IRC_ROOM

Example: $IRC_PREFIX is mqttbot/irc. The room we connect to is #superawesometest. The root topic for this room would be:

mqttbot/irc/%superawesometest

The following subtopics under $IRC_PREFIX/$IRC_ROOM are available:

Table 1. Subtopics

messages	all messages of the IRC room are published to this topic
messages/$NICKNAME	all messages of the user with the nickname are published to this topic
users	everytime the users in the chatroom change, a retained message with all currently connected users is published
topic	everytime the topic of the IRC room changes a retained message is published

MQTT to IRC

It is possible to publish messages to a specific IRC channel via MQTT. Since the # character cannot be used in MQTT topic names, it is replaced by % in topic names by default. To send a message to an IRC chat with MQTT, publish to:

$IRC_PREFIX/$IRC_ROOM

Example: $IRC_PREFIX is mqttbot/irc. The room we connect to is #superawesometest. To publish to this channel, publish to mqttbot/irc/%superawesometest

Caution

DO.NOT.ABUSE This features MUST NOT be abused for spamming IRC channels. You will most likely be banned faster than you think when doing this. Drop your black hat and put on your yellow smiley-face hat.

Packaging

Just run

mvn package

to generate a executable jar file.

Preparation & Starting MQTTBot

Steps before starting MQTTBot

1. Create a config.properties file and place in directory of MQTTBot.

2. Double check if MQTT and IRC properties are correct

3. Start MQTTBot with java -jar XXX.jar (where XXX is the name of the MQTTBot artifact

Caution

Properties file Before starting MQTTBot the first time, be sure to place a config.properties file in the same directory where the jar file of MQTTBot is located. See the configuration documentation for a list of all allowed properties.

Configuration

MQTTBot uses Apache Commons Configuration under the hood, which allows sane property file handling, including the usage of lists and variable interpolation.

Properties

All available properties are listed below:

Table 2. MQTT Properties

Property	Default Value	Description
broker.host	broker.mqttdashboard.com	The hostname or IP of the MQTT message broker
broker.port	1883	The port of the MQTT broker
mqtt.keepAlive	60	The MQTT keepalive interval in seconds
mqtt.clientId	mqtt-bot	The MQTT clientId.
mqtt.cleanSession	true	If the bot should connect to the broker with a clean session
mqtt.username		The MQTT username. Defaults to no username.
mqtt.password		The MQTT password. Defaults to no password.
mqtt.topicPrefix	irc	The MQTT topic prefix when publishing.
mqtt.ircChannelPrefix	%	The prefix of the "#" channel sign for irc chats on mqtt topics. Needed because # ist not a valid mqtt topic character

Tip	You should at least change the MQTT clientId.

Table 3. IRC Properties

Property	Default Value	Description
irc.hostname	irc.freenode.net	The hostname of the IRC server.
irc.port	6667	The port of the IRC server
irc.nickName	mqtt_bot	Nickname of the Bot in IRC rooms
irc.channels	#mqttbottest, #secondmqttbottest	A list of channels the Bot should connect to.

Example properties file

TODO!!!

TODOs

This is not um.. production ready yet. There are still many things to do

• Unit tests are completely missing.

• MQTT and IRC reconnecting is not implemented yet