viera

A useful IRC and ActivityPub bot which links identities and relays messages.

Copyleft

viera is copyrighted, but free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3) license. You can find a copy of it in this package as the LICENSE file.

Setup

You need at least Python 3.5 (3.5.2 or newer recommended) to make use of this software. It simply will not run on older Python versions.

viera uses the new pipenv python environment manager, you should install it before trying to make use of this software:

$ pip3 install pipenv

Next, create the virtual environment for viera to use:

$ pipenv install

Next, copy viera.yaml.example to viera.yaml and edit it as appropriate:

$ cp viera.yaml.example viera.yaml
$ $EDITOR viera.yaml

Finally, you can launch viera:

$ pipenv run python3 -m viera

It is suggested to run this under some sort of supervisor, such as runit, daemontools, s6 or systemd. Configuration of the supervisor is not covered here, as it is different depending on which system you have available.

The bot runs a webserver, internally, on localhost at port 8080. This needs to be forwarded by nginx or similar. The webserver is used to receive ActivityPub messages, and needs to be secured with an SSL certificate inside nginx or similar. Configuration of your webserver is not discussed here, but any guide explaining how to configure a modern non-PHP web application should cover it.

Getting started

It is required to register a services account for the bot. This is different depending on the IRC network in use.

It is also required to use SASL to authenticate to the IRC network. This is supported on most IRC networks.

viera works with ActivityPub identities as the primary source of trust. This means that you are required to link an ActivityPub identity to your IRC identity in order to authenticate to the bot. To do that, make sure you are logged into your NickServ or similar account and message the bot on IRC:

/msg yourbot auth

The bot will respond with an authentication token that you must supply via the fediverse, in most cases you can just copy and paste the exact message it provides.

Following accounts to relay to IRC

Once you have authenticated to an AP identity which is listed in the privileged group in the config file, you may configure the bot to follow accounts, by using the follow command:

/msg yourbot follow https://pleroma.site/users/kaniini

This will cause your bot to request an ActivityPub connection between itself and the user you followed. In most cases this will be set up immediately, but in some cases, there may be a delay, such as when accounts are restricted.

If you want the bot to stop following an account, you can use the unfollow command:

/msg yourbot unfollow https://pleroma.site/users/kaniini