Local Network IRC Server + Web IRC Client + IRC Bot

• Sat, Oct 10, 2015
• 3-minute read

Background and Motivation

Japanese students are often too shy to talk in English, even those from Kyoto University. To keep in communication with them, I built an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server in the local network. It’s set up on an old PC, whose OS was Archlinux, and kernel version was 4.2.2. All the tools I used can be easily installed through package managers like pacman, pip, and npm.

STEP 1: IRC Server

In Archlinux official repositories there are many Internet Relay Chat servers. Here I briefly describe how to install and configure the original IRC server ngircd.¹

Installation

To install ngircd, simply run the following command:

pacman -S ngircd

The configuration files are stored in /etc/ngircd.conf. The documents are available in /usr/share/doc/ngircd directory.

Configuration

The IRC settings can be done in the configuration file /etc/ngircd.conf.

You can set the IRC host information in this file like this:

[Global]
Name = irc.cafemol.net

AdminInfo1 = A.Einstein
AdminInfo2 = Room 201A
AdminEMail = abc@xyz.com

Info = Group chat place for CafeMol users.

Network = theory.biophys.kyoto-u.ac.jp

In the [Limits] block, some limits and timeouts for the ngIRCd instance are defined. You may have to change some of them:

[Limits]
ConnectRetry = 30

# Maximum number of channels a user can be member of (0: no limit):
MaxJoins = 10

# Maximum number of simultaneous connections from a single IP address
# the server will accept (0: unlimited):
MaxConnectionsIP = 50

Here I set MaxConnectionsIP = 50 because I also built a web-based interface for my IRC server, through which every group member can get access. In this case, a limit of larger than 30 (number of members in our group) is necessary.

The [Operator] section is used to define IRC Operator. Change name and password for the Op account.

[Operator]
Name = ein
Password = EIN

Optionally, one can also configure pre-defined channels in [Channel] sections.

Run

Control the ngircd service through systemd:

systemctl enable ngircd.service
systemctl start ngircd.service

STEP 2: Web IRC client

Again, there are many web based IRC clients. Here I demonstrate the installation and configuration of shout.²

Installation

The easiest way to install shout is using npm:

sudo npm install -g shout

Configuration

In my case, the user configuration file is ~/.shout/config.js. Shout is well-documented and thus easy to customize:

module.exports = {
  public: true,
  host: "10.1.1.131",
  port: 9000,
  theme: "themes/zenburn.css",
  
  defaults: {
    name: "CafeMol",
    host: "10.1.1.131",
    port: 6667,
    nick: "cafemol-user",
    username: "cafemol-user",
    realname: "Cafe User",
    join: "#cafemol"
  },
};

Run

shout start

Get access to shout through modern web browsers:

As can be seen, utf-8 is supported. One can type Chinese, Japanese, as well as Emoji. Also, figures can be shown directly in the chatting window.

STEP 3: IRC Bot

Sopel is an easy-to-use IRC bot framework. It’s written in python, and thus is highly extensible.³ With very basic knowledge of python, one can write many interesting and handy extensions.

Installation

Install sopel through pip:

pip install sopel

Luckily for Archlinux users, sopel has been packaged into the Archlinux official community repository.

pacman -S sopel

Configuration

Set name, nick, and host information for the bot through ~/.sopel/default.cfg:

[core]
nick = lysa
host = 10.1.1.131
use_ssl = false
port = 6667
owner = tan
name = Lysa
channels = #cafemol,#biophysics

enable = search,calc,weather,countdown,tld,rand,dice,movie,seen,unicode_info
exclude = adminchannel,meetbot,help,etymology,twit,github,ip
prefix = \;

Run

Usually I run two sopel services simultaneously, one for my local IRC server, the other for freenode.net, using different configurations respectively.

sopel -c config.cfg