IRCAnywhere

IRCAnywhere is an open source web based IRC bonucer application written in javascript. It's designed to be a free alternative to IRCCloud. Unlike IRCCloud where you have little control over uptime and the privacy of your users, IRCAnywhere aims to give the control to you.

Full documentation for IRCAnywhere is available at http://ircanywhere.readthedocs.org/

Release v0.2-beta

Release v0.2-beta is the second installment of IRCAnywhere, which includes a large amount of new features and bug fixes since the previous release, v0.2-alpha. This release contains non backwards compatible database changes, when starting the server, it will warn you about this and advise a clean out of a number of collections channelUsers and events to ensure that nothing breaks.

History

IRCAnywhere has been around for a while, and was first opened to the public as a proprietary service back in 2012. It got open sourced in May, 2013 and we quickly realized that it wasn't as simple and stable as it should be. Recently IRCAnywhere has undergone a massive rewrite completely from the ground up with some fundamental changes to the way it previously worked.

Installing IRCAnywhere

Getting IRCAnywhere

You can either clone the github repository, or install from the 0.2-alpha release. However a number of stability changes have been made since last release so the development branch is usually the most stable. To clone the development branch:

$ git clone https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere.git
$ cd ircanywhere
$ git checkout development

or for 0.2-alpha:

$ wget https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere/archive/v0.2-alpha.tar.gz
$ tar xvf v0.2-alpha.tar.gz
$ cd ircanywhere-0.2-alpha

Pre-requisites

Before we start, make sure you have Node.js and Npm installed. IRCAnywhere also needs gulp to build client files. You can install gulp by running (may need to prefix command with sudo if you get permission errors):

$ npm install -g gulp

Install Script

The install script will automatically install MongoDB if needed, download node dependencies, start MongoDB correctly, create a default config file and compile the client side files.

Note that the install script is only available if you downloaded the development version of IRCAnywhere. Note On windows mongodb has to be installed and started manually before running the install script.

To run the install script, type this command:

$ ./install.sh

On windows the command to start install is:

> install.bat

If you already have MongoDB installed but not set up correctly with Oplog tailing, the script can do that for you as well, simply run:

$ sudo ./install.sh

If this goes through with no errors you can skip to the configuration file section.

Manually Installing

IRCAnywhere uses MongoDB for storage. For installation instructions, see the installing MongoDB section in the documentation.

We need to first install Node dependencies:

$ npm install

Next we'll build the client source:

$ gulp

Finally, rename the sample configuration file config.example.json to config.json.

HTTPS

IRCAnywhere can also be served via HTTPS. Setting it up involves little more than editing the configuration file and setting the ssl property to true. Once this is done you will need to add the following certificate files to private/certs

• private/certs/key.pem
• private/certs/cert.pem

Configuration File

The sample configuration file has comments describing every property. A few items will need to be changed for a production environment such as the ip address and port. You'll need to include a smtp url if you want to be able to send emails out (forgot password links wont work without emails).

Running

There are multiple ways you can run IRCAnywhere, you probably want to run it detaching from the console so it runs on the background as a daemon, you can do that with the following commands:

$ npm start

or

$ node . start

To run attached to the console, so you can easily see console logs, use:

$ node . run

Note that the above commands wont restart the service when an exception occurs. To do this you're going to want to respond to signals to restart if the system crashes or gets killed for some other reason. Traditionally node applications are ran with forever, however there is a strange case causing irc-factory to reboot when the parent restarts which loses our ability to detach from IRC connections keeping them online between restarts, this is not good.

You can use a program called mon to keep the process running. You should use node . run and not node . start when using mon because it will go into a restart loop if you don't.

$ mon -d "node . run" -p ircanywhere.pid -l logs/mon.log

If you're running in a production environment it would be better to run this behind a nginx proxy or similar. You can see install instructions at reverse proxies section in the documentation.

Connecting a client

IRCAnywhere has an built-in IRC server that allows you to connect using a regular IRC client. To enable the irc server make sure your ircServer.enable configuration is set to true and ircServer.port is set appropriately in your config.json file.

To connect a client, use the email you used to register as your login name and set your password accordingly. If you have multiple networks, you need to inform which network you're connecting to in your login by appending your login email with a / and the network name. For example [email protected]/freenode.

Updating

If you cloned the development branch, you can update IRCAnywhere by running the following two commands:

$ git pull
$ ./install.sh

And then restart accordingly. Client side files may be cached, a browser hard reload ctrl+r will force a full reload or try clearing your browser's cache.

Issues

Any bugs (preferably) should be reported via the issues page on this repository. It would be ideal if a screenshot of the bug could be provided (if applicable) and any errors in the javascript console log.

Come talk to us on the #ircanywhere channel in freenode.