eRBie: Waking Up My Dormant IRC Channel with Ruby

I’m that guy who still loves IRC. While my friends migrated to Discord, a handful of us kept a channel alive—barely. It was quiet. Too quiet. I wanted a bot to greet newcomers, remember inside jokes, and post random fun stuff. Nothing too serious.

That’s where eRBie came in—a modular IRC bot framework written in Ruby for macOS. The idea of plugin-based functionality sounded perfect.

The Setup Hiccup: Ruby Version Woes

My first attempt failed immediately. I installed the gem, ran the bot, and got a syntax error. The issue? My system Ruby (2.6) was too old; eRBie needed 2.7+. I use rbenv to manage Ruby versions, so switching to 3.2.2 for this project took two minutes. After that, the bot connected without issues.

The Fun Part: Writing My First Plugin

I wanted a simple !lunch command to suggest food. Creating a plugin was almost embarrassingly easy:

class LunchPlugin
  include Erbie::Plugin
  listen_to :channel, pattern: /^!lunch/
  def handle_channel(event)
    foods = ["Tacos", "Sushi", "Pizza"]
    event.respond "How about #{foods.sample}?"
  end
end

Restart the bot, and it worked. That's it.

What I Ended Up With

An hour later, I had a URL titler (built-in), a factoid system where users can teach the bot commands, and a simple karma plugin from the community. The bot sips about 50MB of RAM and has run for weeks without a hiccup.

The Verdict

If you have an IRC channel gathering dust, eRBie is the perfect excuse to bring it back. It's simple, stable, and genuinely fun to tinker with.