How can I implement a simple IRC client in Perl?

Question

I'm working on a tool that needs to send IRC messages to an internal IRC channel. This isn't a constantly running program, but rather a tool that will be invoked occasionally and needs to be able to notify the channel with a couple of messages when it's invoked.

I looked at Net::IRC, but it's been dead since 2004. So I looked at the alternatives that it lists (Bot::BasicBot and POE::Component::IRC) but both of those need to be run under POE and its event loop. The same problem occurs for something like Net::Async::IRC since it needs to be run in the IO::Async event loop.

I'm not writing a full fledged bot that needs to interact with anything, I just want to login to an irc server, join a channel, post some quick messages and then leave. I don't want to have to re-write this whole program to fit inside of some framework's event loop just to do this.

So, any recommendations for a library for a simple IRC client that won't make me rewrite my whole app?

Answer 1

Use AnyEvent::IRC::Client, while it is using the AnyEvent 'event loop', you don't have to rewrite your app to use it, you can do something like this:

use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::IRC::Client;

with the rest of your module use lines; and something like this

sub do_irc {
    my $log_chan = '#foobar';
    my $timer; 
    my $c = AnyEvent->condvar;
    my $con = new AnyEvent::IRC::Client;

    $con->reg_cb( join => sub {
        my ($con, $nick, $channel, $is_myself) = @_; 
        if ($is_myself && $channel eq $log_chan) {
           $con->send_chan( $channel, PRIVMSG => ($channel, 'my information') );
           $timer = AnyEvent->timer ( 
                after => 1,
                cb => sub {
                    undef $timer;
                    $con->disconnect('done');
                });
        }
    });

    $con->connect($irc_serv, 6667, { nick => $your_nick } );
    $con->send_srv( JOIN => ($log_chan) );
    $c->wait;
    $con->disconnect;

}

to do the connection, it will only return once it is done (error handling left out for brevity). Nothing else in your app needs to use AnyEvent.