Installing IRCAnywhere¶

Automatic Install¶

You can choose to do a manual install if you want to understand how things work, by following the rest of this document, or you can run the install script which will automatically install MongoDB, the npm dependencies, start MongoDB correctly and compile the client side files.

To do this simply run the command

$ ./install.sh

If you already have MongoDB installed but not set up correctly with Oplog tailing, we can do that for you aswell, simply run

$ sudo ./install.sh

If this goes through with no errors you can skip to the running section here.

Installing¶

Once the environment is setup properly you can proceed with installing IRCAnywhere.

The first step is to clone the github repo, or you can install from the 0.2-alpha release. However a number of stability changes have been made since then so the development branch is usually the most stable.

$ git clone https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere.git
$ cd ircanywhere
$ git checkout development

or from 0.2-alpha

$ wget https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere/archive/v0.2-alpha.tar.gz
$ tar xvf v0.2-alpha.tar.gz
$ cd ircanywhere-0.2-alpha

Then we need to install the dependencies (I’ve no idea how this runs on windows, I’m not expecting it to run well because we use fibers. I’d recommend unix/linux based operating systems).

$ npm install

Next you’ll need to build the client source, you’ll need to make sure gulp is installed via npm. Once that is done you can run these commands. You can set gulp up to watch files if you’re doing any development work (including writing plugins) by running gulp watch after the following commands.

$ npm install -g gulp
$ gulp

Finally, edit the configuration file config.example.json a few things will need changed by default, the ip address and port, and you’ll need to include a smtp url if you want to be able to send emails out (forgot password links wont work without emails). Your MongoDB settings should be fine if you’ve followed these instructions or automatically installed it with the installer. Finally rename it to config.json.

HTTPS¶

IRCAnywhere can also be served via HTTPS. Setting it up involves little more than editing the configuration and setting the ssl property to true. Once this is done you will need to add the following files into private/certs

private/certs/key.pem
private/certs/cert.pem

Running¶

There are multiple ways you can run IRCAnywhere, you probably want to run it detaching from the console so it runs as a daemon, you can do that with the following commands:

$ npm start

or

$ node . start

Note that the above commands wont restart it’s self when an exception occurs. To do this you’re going to want to respond to signals to reboot if the system crashes or gets killed for some other reason. Traditionally node applications are ran with forever, however there is a strange case causing irc-factory to reboot when the parent restarts which loses our ability to detach from IRC connections keeping them online between restarts, this is not good.

I use a program called https://github.com/visionmedia/mon to keep the process running. You should use node . run and not node . start when using mon because it will go into a restart loop if you don’t.

$ mon -d "node . run" -p ircanywhere.pid -l logs/mon.log

If you’re running in a production environment it would be better to run this behind a nginx proxy or similar. You can see install instructions at reverse proxies section.

Updating¶

You can update IRCAnywhere by running the following two commands:

$ git pull
$ ./install.sh

And then restart accordingly, note client side files may be cached. A hard reset ctrl+r will force a full reload or try clearing your browser’s cache.