TMI4s

About

TMI4s (Twitch Messaging Interface for Scala) is an abstraction layer that is designed to help manage rate limits and maximize up time for Twitch chat bots.

The premise is that TMI4s will sit between one or more chat bots and mimic Twitch. Instead of connecting to Twitch IRC servers, you connect to TMI4s and the rest is handled for you.

Features

TMI4s is still in it's infancy but hosts a variety of features that make it's use worthwhile.

Managing Rate Limits

You never have to worry about rate limits again. You can send messages to TMI4s as fast as you'd like. It will queue up the messages you send and throttle them accordingly.

It currently rate limits PRIVMSG and JOIN messages, but whispers will be added soon.

Managing Disconnects and Minimizing Downtime

It can take time to join thousands of Twitch channels. Traditionally, all of these channels are joined through a single connection to Twitch. If this connection goes down, you will face a large amount of down time while you rejoin the dropped channels.

TMI4s alleviates this problem by distributing your joins to multiple connections. This way if one connection drops, you are only losing a small number of channels that were living on that connection. Those channels will be queued to be rejoined on a new connection.

TMI4s can also be configured to join each channel twice and automatically filter duplicate messages. If one of the connections drop, you still have a back up connection. Since JOIN messages are rate limited, channels are joined a second time only when you can afford the extra JOINs.

Execution

Dependencies

Java: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

SBT: http://www.scala-sbt.org/

Running TMI4s

From the root directory, run

sbt run

Configuration

The configuration for TMI4s can be found in /src/main/resources/application.conf

In here, you can override defaults that can be found in /src/main/resources/tmi4s.conf

The config is structured like this:

tmi4s {
  twitch {
    irc {
      host = "irc.chat.twitch.tv"
      port = 6667
      limits {
        // <number> of messages to let through every <per> milliseconds,
        //     Uses a rolling window.
        // You can find valid numbers here:
        //     https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc#irc-command-and-message-limits
        messages { // PRIVMSG
          number = 19
          per = 30000 // ms
        }
        joins { // JOIN
          number = 19
          per = 30000 // ms
        }
      }
    }
  }
  // Will join each channel twice to eliminate down time if set to true.
  // Duplicate messages are removed automatically.
  redundancy = true
}