goircd/README

     goircd -- minimalistic simple Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server
     ==============================================================

DESCRIPTION

goircd is very simple IRC server, written on Go.
It is heavily inspired by miniircd daemon written on Python.
GoVPN is free software: see the file COPYING for copying conditions.
It does not aim to replace full featured mass scalable IRC networks:

* It can not connect to other servers. Just standalone installation
* It has few basic IRC commands
* There is no support for channel operators, modes, votes, invites
* No ident lookups

But it has some convincing features:

* Only standard Go libraries, no external requirements
* Single executable binary
* No configuration file, just few command line arguments
* IPv6 out-of-box support
* Ability to listen on TLS-capable ports
* Optional channel logging to plain text files
* Optional permanent channel's state saving in plain text files
  (so you can reload daemon and all channels topics and keys won't
  disappear)
* Optional ability to authenticate users by nickname and password

Some remarks and recommendations related to it's simplicity:

* Use either nohup or similar tools to daemonize it
* Just plain logging on stderr, without syslog support

SUPPORTED IRC COMMANDS

* PASS/NICK/USER during registration workflow
* PING/PONGs
* NOTICE/PRIVMSG
* AWAY, MOTD, LUSERS, WHO, WHOIS, VERSION, QUIT
* LIST, JOIN, TOPIC, +k/-k channel MODE

USAGE

Just execute goircd daemon. It has following optional arguments:

   -hostname: hostname to show for client's connections
       -bind: address to bind to (:6667 by default)
       -motd: absolute path to MOTD file. It is reread every time
              MOTD is requested
     -logdir: directory where all channels messages will be saved. If
              omitted, then no logs will be kept
   -statedir: directory where all channels states will be saved and
              loaded during startup. If omitted, then states will be
              lost after daemon termination
   -tlsbind : enable TLS, specify address to listen on and path
    -tlspem   to PEM file with certificate and private key
  -passwords: enable client authentication and specify path to
              passwords file
          -v: increase verbosity

TLS

If you specify -bind and -tlsbind simultaneously, then you will have
both raw and encrypted listening sockets. You can use -bind "" to
disable raw socket.

AUTHENTICATION

You can turn on optional client authentication by preparing passwords
file and using the -passwords argument. Format of passwords file is:

    login1:password1\n
    login2:password2\n
    ...

LOG FILES

Log files are not opened all the time, but only during each message
saving. That is why you can safely rename them for rotation purposes.

STATE FILES

Each state file has the name equals to room's one. It contains two plain
text lines: room's topic and room's authentication key (empty if none
specified). For example:

    % cat states/meinroom
    This is meinroom's topic
    secretkey

LICENCE

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.