meowkov

Markov chain IRC bot and PoC exercise in golang and Redis

Table of Contents

• Background
  • Markov Chains
• Usage
  • Standalone
  • Docker
  • Populating Corpus
• License

Background

Meowkov is a simple Markov chain IRC bot. Created as a learning exercise in golang and Redis.

Markov Chains

• Markov Chains at Wikipedia
• Markov Chain Explained Visually

Usage

Running Standalone Binary

To start your own instance:

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/lidel/meowkov.git
2. Copy meowkov.conf.template to meowkov.conf and change at least BotName, Channels and RedisServer
3. Run make build to build meowkov binary
4. Run ./meowkov
5. That is all: meowkov bot will join specified room after a few seconds

Commands

• make build builds the app
• make dev-updatedeps updates dependencies to latest versions
• ./meowkov runs the app against meowkov.conf in current directory
• ./meowkov -c /some/path/meowkov.conf runs the app with specified config file
• echo "some text" | ./meowkov -import=true -purge=false adds piped strings to the corpus
• echo "some text" | ./meowkov -import=true -purge=true replaces corpus with piped data (destructive, remember to backup Redis database before executing this)

Running with Docker

To start dockerized instance with latest Redis:

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/lidel/meowkov.git
2. Copy meowkov.conf.template to meowkov.conf and change at least BotName and Channels (RedisServer will be set automatically by Docker)
3. Run make docker-rebuild to build (in foreground) and run (in background) via Docker container
4. That is all: meowkov bot will join specified room after a few seconds

Docker Commands

Makefile provides commands that simplify build and deployment.
Commands assume meowkov.conf to be present in the same directory as Makefile.
Redis data with corpus is persisted to data/dump.rpd.

• make docker-rebuild builds the app and runs it in a container
• make docker-update same as docker-rebuild but also checks for updates of golang and redis images
• make docker-stop stops already existing container
• make docker-start starts already existing container
• make docker-logs tails the output (runs in debug by default)
• make docker-clean removes meowkov containers and a custom image
• echo "some text" | make docker-corpus-add adds piped strings to the corpus
• echo "some text" | make docker-corpus-replace replaces corpus with piped data (destructive, remember to backup data/dump.rpd before executing this)

Populating Corpus

The bot is as good as its corpus.
Running it with empty one will not produce any meaningful results for a long time.
It is a good idea to bootstrap the corpus using old IRC logs, news articles, etc.

Text can be loaded into the corpus (which is backed by Redis) like this:

echo "line one\nline two with more text" | make docker-corpus-add

or if run in standalone mode:

echo "line one\nline two with more text" | ./meowkov -import=true -purge=false

One may also want to generate input on a different machine, for example from weechat logs:

find ~/.weechat/logs -name "*#foo*" -type f -exec sh -c "grep -vP '^.+\t(</-|-->|--|.*\*)\t' {} | cut -f3 -d$'\t'" \; > corpus.txt

Then transfer the file to the box with meowkov and perform import there:

cat corpus.txt | make docker-corpus-add

Changes are instantaneous: corpus import can be performed while bot is running, no restart is required.
The same text can be imported multiple times: Markov chains are kept in Redis Sets which provide automatic deduplication.

License

CC0 Public Domain Dedication