Good example of using libpurple?

Question

I have an old machine in my house and one of the things this machine does is detect whether a particular door in the house has just opened or closed.

Right now, I have that machine post a tweet on a private Twitter account.

I would now like to give this machine its own AIM account and have it send me a message on AIM. The only messages that will be sent are literally "front door open" and "front door closed."

It appears that libpurple is a commonly used library for dealing with various instant messaging protocols and is even used in Adium, but it is terribly complicated and I can't figure out how to use it.

Does anybody have or know of a simple code sample that uses libpurple?

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 12:04

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I personally found the source code of Pidgin to be straightforward to read. There are many more IM clients that use libpurple, though, you can check Wikipedia for more details.

answered Jul 27 '10 at 12:04

smf68

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libpurple was developed as a back-end for Pidgin, so that should be the defacto place to start. But as you say, there's plenty of others using it now as well. – Spudley Feb 11 '11 at 16:34
After 2 years. Do you think your answer should be updated! – Shiplu Mokaddim Jul 03 '12 at 12:08

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 29 '10 at 02:27

I've done this sort of thing in a bash script before. Unfortunately the code is lost, but you may want to look at dbus as a piece of the solution. The code was relatively straightforward.

This page on updating pidgin status might be a good starting point.

For your application, it might be as easy as:

purple-remote uri 'aim:goim?screenname=yourimhandle&message="front door open"'

(Watch the quoting!)

See purple-remote(1).

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 11 '11 at 16:27

I fought through dragons^Wnonexistent documentations and it seems to be plausible:-) Having some time to hack some stuff together, I think it may worth a quick check.

Extended purple-remote script: http://koshinae.pastebin.com/t7UTReWt
Stuff using libpurple: http://koshinae.pastebin.com/HBQiwpDX -
Callback script is run if someone sends an IM, stdout is written back, call this script purple-answering-machine.

Important and good to know, that to use the internal DBus services,

run this in e.g. screen for a long time :),
the purple-remote should be run in the same dbus session. I made a script that starts a session at boot and exports DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS in all user's bashrc. Feels hacky?:)

Anyone with better skills with libpurple, please halp us out! :-)

Uh, and the Makefile: http://koshinae.pastebin.com/TPM8en2i – Koshinae Feb 11 '11 at 16:27 — Koshinae, Feb 11 '11 at 16:27

Fabian Pedregosa · Answer 4 · 2012-03-08T00:00:18.083

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You should definitely take a look into the nullclient.c provided in the libpurple sources (libpurple/example/nullclient.c). It performs logging into server and adds some useful callbacks. To send a message, add this to (for example) the function signed_on:

PurpleConvIm im;
im.conv = purple_conversation_new(PURPLE_CONV_TYPE_IM, account, "other@example.com");
purple_conv_im_send(&im, "open door");

edited Mar 08 '12 at 00:00

answered Feb 24 '12 at 22:55

Fabian Pedregosa

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Good example of using libpurple?

4 Answers4