How should I connect an IRC bot and Meteor web interface?

Question

I've got a few questions here regarding Node, IRC bots, and Meteor.

I'm part of a gaming community that's starting to deal with Twitch.TV streaming, and as such have been asked (due to my love of programming) to write a custom bot to moderate community streaming channels.

My questions are these:

1) What would be the best way to link an IRC bot (which will be written using the IRC library in Node.JS) and a web-based administration system (which will be built using Meteor).

I was told that I could probably use the MongoDB instance (used by Meteor) as a connection point between the two "halves" of the project, and that makes perfect sense, using DDP, or whatever.

For the transmission of data, that seems fine, but what if I wanted to be able to actually CONTROL the bot using the interface, in ways such as allowing a user to control joining/parting of his channel via his control panel

2) My other inquiry is regarding the bot (Node) and being able to detect new users, and the ability to automatically join their channels when accounts are created. I know that Meteor is reactive, and can instantly deal with changes to the MongoDB instance, but wasn't sure if you could do that with regular Node, or if so...how difficult it would be.

Maybe I should just forego the "automatic" thing, and have the user manually have the bot join their channel after they've logged into their new account, allowing them to configure the bot to their liking (custom commands, etc.) before being used for the first time.

Thanks to everyone in advance for their time in reading this novella of information, it's really appreciated.

Answer 1

Using the meteorite npm package you can easily integrate npm packages in your meteor application.

So the best way of creating the irc bot is just integrating a pre existing irc client npm package for example https://www.npmjs.org/package/irc in your meteor application.

Then create a server side class to wrap the functionality you need. I'll use the npm irc package mentionend above for my highlevel example. This package is event based so if you weave it in your meteor application you can do some pretty cool stuff.

Example

var irc = require('irc');
var client = new irc.Client('irc.dollyfish.net.nz', 'myNick',    
{
     channels: ['#blah'],
 });
client.addListener('pm', function (from, message)      
    var action = messageCollection.findOne({message:message});
    //Do stuff based on action...
  });