Marvin was originally an IRC bot (now also supporting discord) that responds to basic questions and provides guidance in the life of anyone involved in any dbwebb courses.
Before you actually start contributing, create an issue and discuss what you want to do. This is just to avoid that your PR will be denied for some random reason.
This project uses uv to manage dependencies and tools. Refer their documentation for instructions how to install it and getting started.
Run the unittests.
uv run pytestRun code coverage and report results in terminal.
uv run pytest --cov=irc2phpbbRun pylint on both production code and the tests.
uv run pylint irc2phpbb
uv run pylint testsRun code coverage and create an html report. An html report of the code coverage is generated in htmlcov/index.html. Other report formats are also supported. If you generate other formats, take care not to commit them to the repository.
uv run pytest --cov=irc2phpbb --cov-report=htmlThe easiest way to run marvin in a real setting is to run it in IRC mode, as that doesn't require any registration with discord services.
Build the python package and the docker image, then start marvin as a container in the background.
uv build
docker compose build
docker compose up -d marvinNow you can connect to localhost with any IRC client of your choice, or you can follow the instructions below to run irssi in a container.
docker compose run --rm irssiYou should be automatically connected to the server and join the #marvin channel.
When you are done, you can shut down all the containers.
docker compose downThe code and API documentation is generated using pdoc.
uv run pdoc --output-dir=docs/pdoc irc2phpbbThe docs are saved at docs/pdoc and can be viewed online.
Marvin started out as a single irc bot script, reading incoming entries from a directory
that external scripts (a PHP-based forum aggregator, since retired) could drop messages
into for posting to the channel. It's since been restructured into the irc2phpbb Python
package installed and run through uv, as described above.
The basic code is from: http://osix.net/modules/article/?id=780 and http://oreilly.com/pub/h/1968. From there its further developed and customized to fit the target forum and target irc-channel.
The rfc for the irc protocol is quite helpful: http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/rfc/
The bot was initially created for use in irc://irc.bsnet.se/#db-o-webb which is an irc channel for teaching & learning programming and web technologies.
Years later it was further developed to work within Discord as a bot, still in a teaching and learning environment.
This means that the code contains some settings to work in that environment and can therefore not just be cloned and installed. Modifications are needed. The script may anyhow be useful as a study object for those in need of similar functionality.
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..: Copyright 2011-2026 by Mikael Roos (mos@bth.se)