impro_bot

A Chat Bot for Twitch.com/Impro_TV -- Or any improv twitch channel

Dependencies

• JavaScript
• Node 8.x
• Express
• tmi.js Javascript library for the Twitch Messaging Interface. docs

Get your twitch account particulars

• Who are you? - The bot will need a twitch account to run, it can be your human account, or its own
  • Username - a common pattern is to use your account name + _bot like benstein_bot
  • Oauth Token - The token to authenticate your chatbot with Twitch's servers. Generate this with https://twitchapps.com/tmi/ (a Twitch community-driven wrapper around the Twitch API), while logged in to your chatbot account. The token will be an alphanumeric string. This is super-secret, so DO NOT COMMIT IT TO GIT! We'll make a .env file, added to .gitignore to keep it secret; keep it safe..
• What do you want? - The Bot needs to know what channel to log onto and do stuff on. You'll need to specify that channel. A good beginning is your own twitch account.

Fork and Clone the repo

• Fork this repo on github
• In the terminal navigate to where you want the project installed (Don't know what that means? Open up an issue and request a better readme)
• $ git clone git@github.com:<MY_GITHUB_USERNAME>/impro_bot.git
• $ cd impro_bot

Add your environment variables

• This app uses dotenv to store environment variables.
• $ touch .env

• BOT_USERNAME=<A_TWITCH_ACCOUNT_USERNAME>
  OAUTH_TOKEN=<THAT_ACCOUNT'S_SECRET_HASH>
  
  CHANNEL_NAME=<THE_CHANNEL_THE_BOT_WILL_RUN_ON>
  

• Don't wrap values in quotes, type or paste them straight.
• Find or generate an ouath token here: with https://twitchapps.com/tmi/
• The token line should look like this: OAUTH_TOKEN=oauth:1awesomerandompassofthislength

Install the dependencies

• This projsect uses npm for installing dependencies. The project won't run without them. Thankfully, once you have npm installed, you can run a simple command in your terminal to take care of that.
• $ npm install

Run Tests

• $ npm test

Start the Bot In Prod

• Twitch has no sandbox. You'll need to test it live.
• Luckily you can easily create a test twitch account that very few will stumble upon.
• $ npm start

Troubleshooting the Mysterious

If you run npm start and you get this mysterious message:

* Connected to irc-ws.chat.twitch.tv:80
[19:25] error: No response from Twitch.

It may be because the OAuth token has expired.

• Try generating a new ouath token here.
• Paste the new token from the site into your .env file so that it replaces your old token.
• In the terminal where the bot is running: <CTRL> c
• $ npm start

=VVV= TWITCH DOCS =VVV=

https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc