This library is a simple wrapper for Skype's dbus-based Linux API.
Currently, it has the following capabilities:
- Get a list of your chats,
- send chat messages,
- receive chat messages,
- use the raw Skype protocol via Skype::Api#invoke and Skype::Api#on_notification. More information about the protocol at developer.skype.com
In order to work with the skype gem, there are a few requirements:
- You need to be on Linux
- You need to have Skype running
- You need dbus installed (e.g., via apt on Ubuntu)
- You need the ruby-dbus gem:
- wget http://github.com/downloads/mvidner/ruby-dbus/ruby-dbus-0.3.1.tgz
- tar xzf ruby-dbus-0.3.1.tgz
- cd ruby-dbus-0.3.1
- follow the instructions in README
- You may want Xvfb (if you want to run Skype head-less)
To confirm it's working, start skype and sign in. Then, open an irb session and:
require 'dbus'
bus = DBus::SessionBus.instance
skype_service = bus.service("com.Skype.API")
client_to_skype = skype_service.object('/com/Skype')
client_to_skype.introspect
api = client_to_skype["com.Skype.API"]
api.Invoke("NAME ruby-skype")
If everything is set up correctly, Skype will now ask whether "ruby-skype" should be allowed to connect.
There are a few examples in examples/ that should give you an idea of how
to use the gem.
Say you want to be running an app that connects to skype on a box that won't have a display attached. For this use case, Xvfb is quite handy:
"Xvfb or X virtual framebuffer is an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory, not showing any screen output." (wikipedia)"
In examples/start_skype, there's a shell script that shows how to start Skype and Xvfb.
You can safely ignore warnings about missing fonts, but if they bother you, try:
sudo aptitude install xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable xfonts-cyrillic
If Xvfb won't start at all, more drastic measures may be required:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
This product uses the Skype API but is not endorsed, certified or otherwise approved in any way by Skype.