Ergonomadic

Ergonomadic is an IRC daemon written from scratch in Go. Pull requests and issues are welcome. Discuss it here or on Freenode in #ergonomadic.

Some Features

• follows the RFCs where possible
• UTF-8 nick and channel names
• gcfg gitconfig-style configuration
• server password (PASS command)
• channels with most standard modes
• IRC operators (OPER command)
• haproxy PROXY protocol header for hostname setting
• passwords stored in bcrypt format
• channels that persist between restarts (+P)

Why?

I wanted to learn Go.

What’s with the name?

“Ergonomadic” is an anagram of “Go IRC Daemon”.

What about SSL/TLS support?

Go has a not-yet-verified-as-safe TLS 1.2 implementation. Sadly, many popular IRC clients will negotiate nothing newer than SSLv2. If you want to use SSL to protect traffic, I recommend using stunnel version 4.56 with haproxy’s PROXY protocol. This will allow the server to get the client’s original addresses for hostname lookups.

What about federation?

IRC federation solves a problem that was more likely to occur on the internet of 1991 than today. We are exploring alternatives to federation that avoid nickname and channel sync issues created during netsplits.

Installation

go get
go install
ergonomadic initdb -conf ergonomadic.conf

Configuration

See the example ergonomadic.conf. Passwords are base64-encoded bcrypted byte strings. You can generate them with the genpasswd subcommand.

ergonomadic genpasswd 'hunter2!'

Running the Server

ergonomadic run -conf ergonomadic.conf

IRC Documentation

• RFC 1459: Internet Relay Chat Protocol
• RFC 2811: IRC Channel Management
• RFC 2812: IRC Client Protocol
• RFC 2813: IRC Server Protocol
• IRC/2 Numeric List