My friends at IndyHall are always talking on HipChat, but I too often forget to open HipChat in my browser and I’m not interested in running their Adobe AIR app. I have been on IRC a lot lately thanks to the Philly Ruby community, so getting my IndyHall hipchats on IRC has been an itch I’ve needed to scratch for awhile.

Steven Merrill has a nice writeup on using HipChat with IRC through BitlBee. I started installing BitlBee to run on my Mac, but then realized there are public servers running BitlBee thanks to kind people around the world. I picked IRC.net since Pittsburgh is close to Philly.

Here’s how to set it up: (replace the words in CAPS with your info)

1. Connect to the IRC server: irc.net:6667
2. Join the &bitlbee room if you’re not already in it
3. Generate a secure password and register it with bitlbee: register PASSWORD
4. In a browser tab, open the XMPP Account Settings page in your HipChat account. You’ll need some of this information.
5. In your IRC client, send account add jabber [email protected] 'PASSWORD' using your HipChat Jabber ID and HipChat password
6. account hipchat set nick_source full_name
7. account hipchat set resource bot
8. account hipchat on
9. /join &hipchat
10. chat add hipchat ROOM_JABBERNAME@CONFERENCE_SERVER #CHANNELNAME. Conference Server will probably be conf.hipchat.com. Give it whatever channel name you want.
11. Before you can join, you must set your nick to match the Room Nickname setting in your HipChat XMPP settings.channel #CHANNELNAME set nick 'ROOM_NICKNAME'
12. /join #CHANNELNAME
13. Start chatting!
14. When you’re ready to sign out of HipChat, use account off. account hipchat off

Thanks to Steven for the instructions. I wouldn’t have figured out BitlBee for a long time without his blog post.

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by Jason