tmi.ex

Connect to Twitch chat with Elixir.

The name is inspired by tmi.js.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding tmi to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:tmi, "~> 0.3.0"},
  ]
end

Documentation can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/tmi/readme.html.

Usage

You can use your own Twitch username, but it is recommended to make a new twitch account just for your bot. You'll also need an OAuth token for the password.

The simplest method to get an OAuth token (while logged in to the account your bot will use), use the Twitch Chat OAuth Password Generator.

Create a handler to deal with chat messages or events:

defmodule MyHandler do
  use TMI.Handler

  @impl true
  def handle_message(message, sender, chat) do
    # Do something with the message.
    IO.puts("Message from #{sender} in #{chat}: #{message}")
  end
end

Available handler callbacks:

handle_connected(server, port)
handle_logged_in()
handle_login_failed(reason)
handle_disconnected()
handle_join(chat)
handle_join(chat, user)
handle_part(chat)
handle_part(chat, user)
handle_kick(chat, kicker)
handle_kick(chat, user, kicker)
handle_whisper(message, sender)
handle_message(message, sender, chat)
handle_mention(message, sender, chat)
handle_action(message, sender, chat)
handle_unrecognized(msg)

Starting

First we need to go over the config options.

Config options

  • :user - Twitch username of your bot user. (lowercase)
  • :pass - OAuth token to use as a password, prefixed with oauth:.
  • :chats - The list of chats to join. (lowercase)
  • :handler - The module that implements the TMI.Handler behaviour.
  • :capabilities - An optional list of :tmi capabilities, defined here. Can be any of: "membership", "tags", and "commands". Defaults to ['membership'] (lowercase)
Capabilities
  • membership - Shows JOINs and PARTs, so you can see when a user joins or leaves chat. docs
  • tags - Will give you a bunch of additional channel and user state data (badges, etc). docs
  • commands - Gives you some Twitch-specific commands. If your bot plans to read commands, it must also use the tags capability because most commands are less useful or even meaningless without tags. docs

Next, we can connect. Start TMI manually with:

config = [
  user: "mybotusername",
  pass: "oauth:mybotoauthtoken",
  chats: ["mychat"],
  handler: MyHandler,
  capabilities: ['membership']
]

TMI.supervisor_start_link(config)

Or you can add it to your supervision tree, for example in MyApp.Application:

children = [
  {TMI.Supervisor, config}
]

The handler is for handling incoming messages, whispers, etc.

However, what if you want to interact?

TMI.message("mychat", "Hello World")

TMI.whisper("some_user", "Hey there")

TMI.action("mychat", "jumps around frantically")