IRCd

Internet Relay Chat daemon: Charybdis

IRCd is a free and open source server which facilitates real-time communication over the internet. It was started in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of Oulu and its derivatives underpinned the major IRC networks for decades. Eventually the project found itself under the curation of William Pitcock et al, whom after 2005 further developed it under the brand Charybdis.

In 2014 a new approach was proposed to reinvigorate real-time communication in lieu of growing proprietary competition from opaque cloud services. This is known as the Matrix Protocol: a superset of IRC that evolves it into a federation of networks and provides a means for interoperability with the modern 21st century internet messaging ecosystem.

IRCd has been rewritten to implement the Matrix Protocol using some of the latest techniques available for modern C++ free software. Just like the first iteration of IRCd, the latest Charybdis employs technologies in vogue for this era which provide a fulfilling experience for users and a powerfully extensible environment for developers.

Charybdis/5

Charybdis is designed to be fast and highly scalable, and to be community developed by volunteer contributors over the internet. This mission strives to make the software easy to understand, modify, audit, and extend. It remains true to its roots with its modular design and having minimal requirements. Even though almost all of the old code has been rewritten, the same spirit and philosophy of the predecessor is still obvious throughout.

This is the first implementation of a Matrix homeserver written in C++. It serves matrix clients over HTTP. Additionally the RFC1459 family of legacy grammars are employed to translate matrix to and from legacy IRC networks supporting TS6.

Link charybdis/4 to charybdis/5 to federate your IRC network clients.

Installation

Getting up and running with Charybdis is easy. A deployment can scale from as little as a low-end virtual machine running a stock linux distribution to a large load balanced cluster operating in synchrony.

Dependencies

Boost (1.61 or later) - We have replaced libratbox with the well known and actively developed Boost libraries. These are included as a submodule in this repository.

RocksDB (based on LevelDB) - We replace sqlite3 with a lightweight and embedded database and have furthered the mission of eliminating the need for external "IRC services"

Other dependencies: sodium (NaCl crypto), OpenSSL, zlib, snappy (for rocksdb)

Build dependencies: gnu++14 compiler, automake, autoconf, autoconf2.13, autoconf-archive, libtool, shtool

Downloading Charybdis

git clone https://github.com/charybdis-ircd/charybdis cd charybdis git checkout 5 - Verify you have the latest source tree and are on the Matrix branch.

Building from git (production)

./autogen.sh ./configure make sudo make install

Building from git (DEVELOPER PREVIEW INSTRUCTIONS)

This is only intended to allow development with dependencies that have not made their way to mainstream systems yet. Not for release.

The developer preview will install charybdis in a specific directory isolated from the system. It will avoid using system libraries by downloading and building the dependencies from the submodules we have pinned here and build them the way we have configured. You may need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the built libraries and/or maintain an intact build directory.

./autogen.sh mkdir build

• The install directory may be this or another place of your choosing.
• If you decide elsewhere, make sure to change the --prefix in the ./configure statement below.

CXX=g++-6 ./configure --prefix=$PWD/build --enable-debug --with-included-boost=shared --with-included-rocksdb=shared

• Many systems alias g++ to an older version. To be safe, specify a version manually in CXX. This will also build the submodule dependencies with that version.
• The --with-included-* will fetch, configure and build the dependencies included as submodules. Include =shared for now until static libraries are better handled.

make make install

Platforms

This branch is not meant for production. Use at your own risk.

Continuously Integrated Host	Compiler	Third party	Status
Linux Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial	GCC 6	Boost 1.62
Linux Ubuntu 14.04 Xenial	Clang 3.8	Boost 1.62
Apple Darwin 15.5	LLVM 7.3.0	Boost 1.62
Windows	mingw 3.5	Boost 1.62

Tips

• Please read doc/index.txt to get an overview of the current documentation.

• Read the NEWS file for what's new in this release.

Developers

• Generate doxygen using /usr/bin/doxygen tools/doxygen.conf the target directory is doc/html. Browse to doc/html/index.html