This program is intended to be a simple, generic and extensible jabber bot. One of the goals of the project was to provide a presence based monitoring system. This is the reason for choosing xmpp.

After writing some lines of code, we saw that a generic solution could be implemented. And then, we did it.

In the next few lines bellow you'll know how to install, use and patch it.

Before anything you have to install two basic libraries to be able to see bitu working properly: taningia and iksemel.

This library is available in various systems, including in the Debian GNU/Linux. If you're using Debian, you can install this taningia dependency by issuing the command:

# aptitude install libiksemel-dev

If you are using Mac OS X, you can use this gist as homebrew formula

I'm currently using the 1.5 version of iksemel and things seem to work properly.

It is a generic comunication library that provides a simple xmpp client lib (among other things).

To install it, you should first download it using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/clarete/taningia.git

After that, enter in the downloaded directory and run the autogen.sh script, like this:

$ cd taningia
$ ./autogen.sh

The autogen.sh script will also call the configure script. So you can pass the configure params directly to the `autogen.sh' one. Like this:

$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/tmp/mytestbase

After that, you should compile the library. To do this, you can do the following:

$ make

But wait! If you're planning to use this library and never see a bug... you should give up right now (just joking =D). But it is wise to compile it with debug support when writting applications based on it. To do it, execute the following command:

$ make CFLAGS="-g -O0 -DDEBUG"

Now it is time to install the bitu program itself. It is quite easy to do this. Just follow the same stuff you did with taningia:

$ ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make
$ sudo make install

To get more information about the installation, please consulte the INSTALL file.

Since it is a jabber bot, you'll need an already configured jabber server. All tests were done using `ejabberd' (also available in Debian).

First of all, go to the ejabberd administration and create two users. For example, the admin@localhost and server@localhost.

Connect to the admin@localhost in your preferred xmpp client. And then, add the server@localhost to your roster. Currently, the jabber bot does not accept any presence subscription. You'll have to do it by using the ejabberd web interface. Open a browser and point it to the http://localhost:5280/admin address. Follow the way "Virtual Hosts" -> "localhost" -> "Users" -> "server@localhost" -> "Roster" and then you'll see the authorization request of the admin user.

We currently have two builtin plugins. The cpuinfo and the uptime ones. Both are installed in $(libdir)/bitu. To use them, you will have to load them to bitu. We have two ways for doing this. The first is to create a config file and append something like this to the config file:

load libprocessor.so
load libuptime.so

Save the config file with any name anywhere. Now, you have to make sure that the $(libdir)/bitu dir is inside LD_LIBRARY_PATH envvar. Do the following to make sure:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/path/to/your/lib/bitu

We're getting closer and closer to see it working, just follow the last step and see what we can do =D

If you are using Mac OS, remember that LD_LIBRARY_PATH becomes DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Now, you just have to call bitu with the connection parameters and with the plugin list file. Like this:

$ bitu --jid=server@localhost \
       --password=<yourpasswd>  \
       --config-file=/path-to-your-config-file

If you receive any ConnectionError stuff, try to inform the host ip with the parameter --host. like this:

$ bitu --jid=server@localhost \
       --password=<yourpasswd>  \
       --host=127.0.0.1 \
       --plugins-config=/path-to-your-config-file

Bitu is a xmpp bot so presence is an intrisec concept. To make it available all the time, configuration must be changed at the runtime with no need to restart anything.

There are some few configuration parameters that you will not be able to change while bitU is running. Like the jid, password, host and local server configuration. All other commands are possible to run using a helper program called bituctl.

There are plans to listen to the SIGHUP and reload configuration file.