Simple IRC ⟷ Skype Gateway Bot

FEATURES

• Mirror messages from IRC channel to Skype chatroom and vice versa
• Support regular messages, emotes (/em) and Skype message edits
• Only from IRC side
  • In chat, trigger mirroring transparently by adressing the bot with ON or OFF
  • Direct messages to bot
    • Turn mirroring to Skype ON or OFF for the user, get user's present STATUS
    • Query for Skype users mirrored to IRC channel using INFO #channel

After Skype dropped it's support for creating P2P chats and has stated that P2P clients will not be supported in the future, I have decided to rely on Libpurple for bridging Skype chats on my Raspberry PI instance (the good side is that you can bridge anything that has a Libpurple plugin):

• https://github.com/boamaod/rainbow-bridge

INSTALL

On Ubuntu/Debian you need python-irclib and python-skype as well as Skype itself to run the script.

For python-skype I used the version 1.0.31.0 provided at ppa:skype-wrapper/ppa. Although newer version is packaged even for Ubuntu 11.04, this package didn't work out of the box on Ubuntu 12.04. Using latest source version from https://github.com/awahlig/skype4py works fine on Ubuntu 14.04.

CONFIGURE

You can configure the IRC servers and Skype chatrooms to mirror in the header of skype2irc.py. You may define one IRC server and as many pairs of IRC channels and Skype chatrooms as you like. Skype chatrooms are defined by the blob, which you can obtain writing /get uri in a chatroom.

You may need to join your Skype chatroom to be mirrored before actually starting the gateway, because it seems that Skype API isn't always able to successfully join the chatroom using a blob provided (I usually get a timeout error). So make sure you have an access to chatroom using GUI before starting to hassle with the code.

The default values provided in the header of skype2irc.py should be enough to give the program a test run.

If you want to use an option to save broadcast states for IRC users, working directory for the script has to be writable.

RUN

To run the gateway, Skype must be running and you must be logged in. You can do command line log in using echo username password | skype --pipelogin or you may just enable auto login from GUI. If you start skype2irc.py there will be a pop up window opened by your Skype instance on first run to authorize access to Skype for Skype4Py. You can either allow access just once or remember your choice.

You can run skype2irc.py just from command line or use ircbot.sh to loop it. You can also run it from plain terminal providing the X desktop Skype will be started like DISPLAY="host:0.0" ./skype2irc.py.

It could also make sense to run it using ssh -X user@host session, virtual framebuffer or with something similar.