teamchat

XKCD

teamchat breaks the barriers between communities and instant messaging platforms.

teamchat replays messages from two different communication systems to each other in order to allow everyone to talk to each other regardless of their chat platform preferences.

The project is meant to be a spiritual successor to slack-irc which stopped working when Slack discontinued the IRC gateway.

TL;DR

In a nutshell, teamchat leverages Errbot, a python chatbot framework. It launches two bots, one for each desired backend.

These bots will relay messages they see in their channel to each other over a localhost webhook implementation that Errbot provides out of the box.

That's it, really.

Supported backends

Errbot supports many different backends out of the box:

• XMPP (Any standards-compliant XMPP/Jabber server should work - Google Talk/Hangouts included)
• Hipchat
• IRC
• Slack
• Telegram

Many other backends are available through community support such as Discord, Mattermost and Skype.

Installing teamchat

Anywhere with python >= 3.6 available:

pip3 install teamchat

Configuring teamchat

teamchat launches two chat bots, one in each of the configured and requested backends. It joins the desired channels and then forwards messages from one channel to the other in both directions.

Each of your communication backend must be configured in a different Errbot settings file.

You can get started from the Errbot configuration template by running teamchat template which will generate a template for you at ~/.teamchat/backends/template.py.

When running the teamchat connect command to create the bridge, these backend file names will be used. For example:

• The backend named slack_community would be expected at ~/.teamchat/backends/slack_community.py
• The backend named irc_community would be expected at ~/.teamchat/backends/irc_community.py.

Your server, credentials, nicknames, tokens and other fine tuning will need to be set up through those files according to the Errbot backend configuration documentation.

Please note that your backend settings file needs to contain a few extra lines meant for teamchat:

import teamchat

# The following configuration is required for teamchat
ROOT = os.path.expanduser("~/.teamchat")
BOT_DATA_DIR = os.path.join(ROOT, "irc")
BOT_LOG_FILE = os.path.join(ROOT, "bot.log")
BOT_EXTRA_PLUGIN_DIR = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(teamchat.__file__), "errbot")

for directory in [ROOT, BOT_DATA_DIR]:
    if not os.path.isdir(directory):
        os.makedirs(directory, mode=0o700, exist_ok=True)

For examples of backend configuration files, look at the contrib directory of the project on GitHub.

Using teamchat

Getting started with teamchat once you have your configuration set up looks like this:

teamchat connect irc_community \    # From IRC
         --bridge slack_community \ # To Slack
         --channel "#dev" \         # From #dev on the server configured in ~/.teamchat/backends/irc_community.py
         --to "#general"            # To #general on the server configured in ~/.teamchat/backends/slack_community.py

The order of the arguments as well as the from/to destinations does not matter. The messages will always be replayed from one backend to the other in both directions.

For example, the following command would yield the exact same results as the one above:

teamchat connect slack_community \ # From Slack
     --bridge irc_community \      # To IRC
     --channel "#general" \        # From #general on the server configured in ~/.teamchat/backends/slack_community.py
     --to "#dev"                   # To #dev on the server configured in ~/.teamchat/backends/irc_community.py

Known issues

• Naming your backend file ~/.teamchat/backends/irc.py does not work because it conflicts with the irc python module.

Contributors

See contributors on GitHub.

Copyright

Copyright 2018 Red Hat, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.