HiveMind HackChat Bridge

Relay a hack.chat channel to a HiveMind hub.

hack.chat is a minimal, anonymous, channel-based websocket chat. This bridge is a HiveMind satellite whose input and output are a hack.chat channel instead of a microphone. Channel messages become utterances sent to the hub; the hub's spoken reply is posted back into the channel, addressed to the user. Any HiveMind hub (and the OVOS skills behind it) becomes a hack.chat bot.

hack.chat channel  ⇄  HiveMind-HackChatBridge  ⇄  HiveMind hub  ⇄  OVOS skills

Prerequisites

• A running HiveMind hub (hivemind-core) reachable over the network, and a HiveMind access key for this bridge (hivemind-core add-client).
• A hack.chat channel name to join, and a nickname for the bot. hack.chat is anonymous — no account or token is required.

Install

pip install HiveMind-HackChatBridge

Or from a checkout:

git clone https://github.com/JarbasHiveMind/HiveMind-HackChatBridge
cd HiveMind-HackChatBridge
pip install .

Declared dependencies: hivemind-bus-client, ovos-bus-client, ovos-utils, websocket-client, click.

Quickstart

1. Register the bridge on the hub (where hivemind-core is installed):

hivemind-core add-client --name hackchat-bridge \
  --access-key "your-access-key" --password "your-password"

2. Run the bridge. Configuration is passed on the command line via the hivemind-hackchat-bridge console script (or python -m hackchat_bridge):

hivemind-hackchat-bridge \
  --channel your_channel \
  --username Jarbas_BOT \
  --access-key "your-access-key" \
  --password "your-password" \
  --host ws://127.0.0.1 \
  --port 5678

4. Send a message. Open the same channel at https://hack.chat/?your_channel and type:

what time is it?

The bridge forwards the message to the hub and posts the reply back as @user , <answer>.

Configuration

hivemind-hackchat-bridge options:

Option	Description	Default
--channel	hack.chat channel name to join	— (required)
--username	Bot nickname shown in the channel	Jarbas_BOT
--host	HiveMind hub host (wss:// / ws://)	ws://127.0.0.1
--port	HiveMind hub port	5678
--access-key	HiveMind access key	None
--password	HiveMind password	None
--self-signed	Accept self-signed SSL certificates	off
--lang	Language code for utterances	en-us

The bridge forwards every channel message except its own, stripping a leading @username mention of the bot before sending.

Troubleshooting

• Bot joins but never answers — confirm the hub is reachable and the access key/password are registered (hivemind-core list-clients), and that the hub produces a speak for the answer.
• Wrong channel — the bot and the user must be on the same hack.chat channel name; open https://hack.chat/?<channel>.

Documentation

• Operator setup — hack.chat is anonymous (no account/token); registering the bridge on a HiveMind hub, the run command, and the network-only live e2e.

See also docs/ for a full setup walkthrough, a configuration reference, and worked examples.