Experienced setting up an IRC bot?

I have a web host that I should be able to set it up on. I would be wanting to use it as a channel helper that can pull information from a website in response to something typed into a channel. For example, if someone in the channel says "!lookup cat" the bot might be able to pull the first few lines of text from the wikipedia page on cat or something.

What bot should I use? Can it be set up on most web hosts? What else do i need?

Thanks!

Eric H

The main problem here is that on most web host providers you are not able to run any kind of serversoftware. You need a software which is always connected to irc.

What you could do (i´m just saying loud what i´m thinking about):
Write a php-script which gets the request via httputils2 (job.download("...pathto.php?lookup=cat")) from your app
This php script then post the answer to an irc-channel

But why not using the php directly to get the response you want to get?

Don,

Thanks for the response

I am actually not planning for this to be connected to any type of app. My plan is to create an IRC channel that people can discuss things about a specific topic and/or get support about a specific product. The best implementation I have seen of this in action was when I was working with the CMS system, Drupal. They had a channel called #Drupal and another one called #Drupal-support. Both channels had a bot in them called "Druplicon" and it would respond to things like '!seen <username>' with 'I last saw <username> in #Drupal-support on 4/15/14 at 3:22pm PST saying "Hello, World!" ' and the other great thing that it was able to do was when someone came into the chat and asked a question about a particular topic, the bot would pick out any Drupal module names from the question and would display a link in the chat room so the user could read about it (and possibly answer their own question). Other more experienced Drupal support users would also use this as a shortcut to help people if they were saying something like "Does Drupal have a module that will let me connect to my social networks?" and the support giver would just type in something like 'SocialModule?' and the bot would post a link to the module and the first sentence of the module description.

As I am typing this, I am beginning to wonder if I should just go look up Druplicon and see if I can use that bot and customize it for my needs... Alas, I am thinking aloud also.

Eric H

It is also possible to rent an ircbouner... A german one costs 0,60 Euro/Month... This bot always is connected to one or more channels. All what is written in this channel(s) he will log... If you (or maybe an php-script) then connects to irc the bot can show you all what have written in the channel(s)...
the php-script then can do the work with these logs and "answer" the request... the php-script can be called every minute with a cronjob... so, an answer is only 1 minute away...

Only experience I've had with irc bots, was one I wrote in mirc script direct and use to run it on an old pIII machine I had setup at home. It had no screen, input device, case, lol. Just a mobo, ram, cpu and HDD sat on a shelf. Bringing back the memories....

It's well over a decade since I last ran in IRC bot (possibly not even this century!); the one I used was called Eggdrop, and used a whole load to Tcl/tk scripts to do the sort of thing you mention. It needs a machine more or less permanently connected to the net - wasn't a problem for me as I had a fixed connection with public IP address even back then. I doubt I can remember much at all about setting it up, since it was so long ago, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't too tricky.