uirc3

The unethical IRC trinity. This project consists of an experimental IRC client, daemon, and bot. It’s all you’re ever going to need for chatting.

All of them have these potentially interesting properties:

• full IPv6 support

• TLS support, including client certificates

• minimal dependencies

• very compact and easy to hack on

• permissive license

degesch

The IRC client. It is largely defined by being built on top of GNU Readline. Its interface should however feel familiar for weechat or irssi users.

This is the youngest and largest application within the project. It has most of the stuff you’d expect of an IRC client, such as being able to set up multiple servers, powerful configuration system, integrated help, mIRC text formatting, CTCP queries, automatic splitting of overlong messages, autocomplete, logging to file, and command aliases.

kike

The IRC daemon. It is designed to be used as a regular user application rather than a system-wide daemon. If all you want is a decent, minimal IRCd for a small network of respectful users (or bots), or testing, this one will do it.

Notable features:

• TLS autodetection (why doesn’t everyone have this?)

• IRCop authentication through TLS client certificates

• epoll/kqueue support; it should be able to handle quite a number of users

• partial IRCv3 support

Not supported:

• server linking (which also means no services); I consider existing protocols for this purpose ugly and tricky to implement correctly

• online changes to configuration; the config system from degesch could be used

• limits of almost any kind, just connections and mode +l

ZyklonB

The IRC bot. It builds upon the concept of my other VitaminA IRC bot. The main characteristic of these two bots is that they run plugins as coprocesses, which allows for enhanced reliability and programming language freedom.

While originally intended to be a simple C99 rewrite of the original bot, which was written in the GNU dialect of AWK, it fairly quickly became a playground where I added everything that seemed nice, and it eventually got me into writing the rest of this package.

Notable features:

• resilient against crashes, server disconnects and timeouts

• SOCKS support (even though socksify can add that easily to any program)

Building

Build dependencies: CMake, pkg-config, help2man, awk, sh, liberty (included)
Runtime dependencies: openssl, curses (degesch), readline or libedit >= 2013-07-12 (degesch)

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/pjanouch/uirc3.git
$ mkdir uirc3/build
$ cd uirc3/build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
           -DWANT_READLINE=ON -DWANT_LIBEDIT=OFF
$ make

To install the application, you can do either the usual:

# make install

Or you can try telling CMake to make a package for you. For Debian it is:

$ cpack -G DEB
# dpkg -i uirc3-*.deb

Note that for versions of CMake before 2.8.9, you need to prefix cpack with fakeroot or file ownership will end up wrong.

Running

degesch has in-program configuration. Just run it and read the instructions.

For the rest you might want to generate a configuration file:

$ zyklonb --write-default-config
$ kike --write-default-config

After making any necessary edits to the file (there are comments to aid you in doing that), simply run the appropriate program with no arguments:

$ zyklonb
$ kike

ZyklonB stays running in the foreground, therefore I recommend launching it inside a Screen or tmux session.

kike, on the other hand, immediately forks into the background. Use the PID file or something like killall if you want to terminate it. You can run it as a forking type systemd user service.

Client Certificates

kike uses SHA1 fingerprints of TLS client certificates to authenticate users. To get the fingerprint from a certificate file in the required form, use:

$ openssl x509 -in public.pem -outform DER | sha1sum

Contributing and Support

Use this project’s GitHub to report any bugs, request features, or submit pull requests. If you want to discuss this project, or maybe just hang out with the developer, feel free to join me at irc://anathema.irc.so, channel #anathema.

Disclaimer

I am not an antisemitist, I’m just being an offensive asshole with the naming. And no, I’m not going to change the names.

License

uirc3 is written by Přemysl Janouch <p.janouch@gmail.com>.

You may use the software under the terms of the ISC license, the text of which is included within the package, or, at your option, you may relicense the work under the MIT or the Modified BSD License, as listed at the following site:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html