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 and runs as a single-node server or can be part of a network of ngIRCd servers in a LAN or across the internet. It optionally supports the IPv6 protocol, SSL/TLS-protected client-server and server-server links, the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) system for user authentication, IDENT requests, and character set conversion for legacy clients.

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

Status

Development of ngIRCd started back in 2001: The server has been written from scratch in C, tries to follow all relevant standards, and is not based on the forefather, the daemon of the IRCNet.

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

ngIRCd is used as the daemon in real-world in-house and public IRC networks and included in the package repositories of various operating systems.

Advantages and strengths

• 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 WSL or Cygwin.

Documentation

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

The INSTALL.md document describes how to install and upgrade ngIRCd. It is included in all distribution archives and available online on GitHub.

Please see the file doc/QuickStart.md in the doc/ directory or on GitHub for information about setting up and running ngIRCd, including some real-world configuration examples.

More information can be found in a couple of files in the doc/ directory (online on GitHub) and in the documentation section on the homepage of ngIRCd.

In addition, ngIRCd comes with two manual pages: ngircd(8) (for the daemon) and ngircd.conf(5) (for its configuration file). They have even more details and list all possible command line parameters and configuration options. You can read them with the man command (when they are installed locally on your system, e.g. man 8 ngircd and man 5 ngircd.conf) or online here:

• Daemon: ngircd(8)
• Configuration file: ngircd.conf(5)

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.

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@lists.barton.de

See https://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