ngircd

ngIRCd - Internet Relay Chat Server Introduction

ngIRCd is a free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server for small or private networks, developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL); please see the file COPYING for licensing information.

The server is quite easy to configure, can handle dynamic IP addresses, and optionally supports IDENT, IPv6 connections, SSL-protected links, and PAM for user authentication as well as character set conversion for legacy clients. The server has been written from scratch and is not based on the "forefather", the daemon of the IRCNet.

The name ngIRCd means next-generation IRC daemon, which is a little bit exaggerated: lightweight Internet Relay Chat server most probably would have been a better name :-)

Please see the INSTALL.md document for installation and upgrade information, online available here: https://ngircd.barton.de/doc/INSTALL.md!

Status

The development of ngIRCd started back in 2001 and in the meantime it should be quite feature-complete and stable to be used as a daemon in real-world IRC networks.

It is not the goal of ngIRCd to implement all the nasty behaviors of the original ircd, but to implement most of the useful commands and semantics specified by the RFCs that are used by existing clients.

Features (or: why use ngIRCd?)

• Well arranged (lean) configuration file.
• Simple to build, install, configure, and maintain.
• Supports IPv6 and SSL.
• Can use PAM for user authentication.
• Lots of popular user and channel modes are implemented.
• Supports "cloaking" of users.
• No problems with servers that have dynamic IP addresses.
• Freely available, modern, portable and tidy C source.
• Wide field of supported platforms, including AIX, A/UX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and Windows with Cygwin.

Documentation

The homepage of the ngIRCd project is https://ngircd.barton.de.

Installation on ngIRCd is described in the file INSTALL.md in the source directory; please see the file doc/QuickStart.md in the doc/ directory for some configuration examples.

More documentation can be found in the doc/ directory and online.

Downloads & Source Code

You can find the latest information about the ngIRCd and the most recent stable release on the news and downloads pages of the homepage.

Visit our source code repository at GitHub if you are interested in the latest development code: https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd.

Problems, Bugs, Patches

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you encounter problems:

• On IRC: irc://irc.barton.de/ngircd
• Via the mailing list: ngircd-ml@ngircd.barton.de

See http://ngircd.barton.de/support for details.

If you find any bugs in ngIRCd (which most probably will be there ...), please report them to our issue tracker at GitHub:

• Bug tracker: https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/issues
• Patches, "pull requests": https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/pulls