camptail - a simple tail for campfire rooms

NOTE

This software is no longer actively maintained. It worked fine the last time I used it, but as my workplace switched from Campfire to Slack, it has been several years since I've even tried to run. Caveat emptor!

Introduction

Camptail is an absurdly simplistic tail-like program for tracking the output of campfire rooms. It connects to the campfire server, looks at each room you are currently in, outputs a configurable number of backlog messages, and then goes into a loop, outputting any new messages that are generated in any room.

Configuration

Camptail looks for configuration in the .camptailrc file in your $HOME directory. This file is interpreted as perl, and you can set any variable you like. The useful ones are:

• $host -- the campfire host to connect to (e.g., use "foo" if you usually go to "foo.campfirenow.com")

• $auth -- your auth token from the campfire site

• $tail -- how many backlog messages to show for each room

• $delay -- delay, in seconds, between poll of each room

• $callback -- a reference to a subroutine to perform output; see below for details

Output

By default, camptail writes a text representation of each message to stdout. However, you can override or augment this behavior by supplying a custom perl callback function. The callback will receive a Campfire::Message and a Campfire::Room object as its arguments.

A custom callback replaces the default print-on-stdout callback. To chain to it, call print_message(@_). The callback is free to do whatever it wants, including ignoring certain messages, printing them differently, or performing some other action.

The message and room objects are currently not well documented; you'll have to look at the source code for a list of methods.

Example

My .camptailrc file looks something like this:

# Your campfire host, as in myorg.campfirenow.com
$host = 'myorg';

# Your auth token from campfire. I keep mine separate from the rc
# file so I can tweak the permissions but still show people this
# file.
chomp($auth = `cat ~/.campfire-auth`);

# Notify via libnotify
sub notify {
  my ($message, $summary) = @_;
  system(qw(notify-send), $summary, $message);
}

$callback = sub {
  my ($message, $room) = @_;

  # Messages mentioning me are important. Let's notify, but
  # also print the message to stdout, so we can get a running tail
  # of interesting messages.
  if ($message->body =~ /peff/i) {
    notify($message, "you were mentioned by " . $message->name);
    print_message(@_);
  }
  # As are ones in this important room, assuming they contain actual
  # content (and not a timestamp, somebody leaving or entering,
  # etc).
  elsif ($room->name eq 'Important Room') {
    return unless $message->type eq 'TextMessage';
    notify($message, 'important room message');
    print_message(@_);
  }
}

Requirements

Camptail uses the WWW::Curl, XML::Smart, DateTime, and URI perl modules. You can install them on Debian-ish systems with:

sudo apt-get install libwww-perl libxml-smart-perl liburi-perl

Installation

To build from the git repository, you will need the mfm tool. You can get it here: http://github.com/peff/mfm

Then run:

mfm
make
make install

Alternatively, you can run without building from the camptail directory:

perl camptail.pl

Author

Comments, suggestions, bug reports, and patches are welcome. Contact me at peff@peff.net.