IRCAnywhere - A free open source alternative to IRCCloud built with Node.js and Emberjs reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rickibalboa · 2014-05-09 16:51 Hello all, a little few of you may have heard of this project, I'm posting here to raise awareness of it and hopefully gather some more willing contributors. * [IRCAnywhere](http://ircanywhere.com) The project is called IRCAnywhere and aims to be a free open source version of [IRCCloud](http://irccloud.com), it's not an embeddable client like [kiwiirc](http://kiwiirc.com). It's been around a while, probably a couple of year now, and it (if you tried to use it back then, will agree that it) was a terrible piece of software. Used multiple languages and services, was difficult to install, had an array of dependencies, and barely worked. Yet I still got countless emails and interest from it because the demand for a product like this seemed to be fairly high. In about November I set upon the task of rewriting it completely from the ground up. It's built entirely in Javascript, and uses Node.js. I started with Meteor but quickly stripped it out and realised it wasn't up to the task. It's currently in an alpha state and is much more stable than it's ever been. Bearing in mind it IS alpha and it does have bugs, but is definitely usable. * https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere * https://github.com/ircanywhere/irc-factory A little about the architecture and features: * It uses an IRC library called irc-factory which I wrote, irc-factory is quite a beast, it can easily manage hundreds of IRC clients. It can fork itself to minimise downtime and can be controlled through an IPC. It has channel list caching and pagination. It knows when a network is throttling it and will queue any more clients (much like IRCCloud when you see restarts on freenode, you can't just open up a hundred sockets and expect all clients to connect!). * It's designed to be used by multiple users and for teams, think development teams etc. Much like Hipchat, Campfire, Grove.io, but open source and on IRC. * The frontend is built using LESS and Ember.js (unfortunately incredibly large channels have a render time of a couple of seconds right now because of Ember.Handlebars, HTMLbars will vastly improve this sometime this year). * Fancy features such as replaying and loading older logs, /list pagination in browser! At the moment there is few contributors - I'm the main developer, there are a couple of people contributing patches and starting to get in on the action, I have a lot of interest, and a huge mailing list, but so little time to work on this as much as I'd like to. A little about where the project is heading: * An extensive and incredibly powerful plugin system is planned, the ability to code in bots and recognition for git commit hashes and all sorts of crazy stuff will be possible, and easy to do! * A traditional IRC client interface so the BNC can be accessed from your favourite IRC client and still retain all the logging functionalities. * A management/dashboard panel allowing admins to lock the system down, do things like restrict users to certain networks. I also want to add a nice statistics/metrics panel. * Clustering, because of how the underlying system works (uses MongoDB’s Oplog tailing), I've carved the path for clustering multiple processes together to horizontally scale if you have a lot of users. There is a demo at http://try.ircanywhere.com/ - but I don't have an i:line on freenode yet so you might not be able to get on if I hit my user limit. There is also a one line install script which does everything for you, we've tried to really make it as easy as possible for people to get started, unlike last time! If this seems like a project you would be interested in using or contributing to, please get in touch! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2014-05-09 19:48 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- austindkelly · 2014-05-09 19:50 Well with this you are hosting it yourself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SimplyTheDoctor007 · 2014-05-09 22:01 I'm not that deep into the technical side of IRC, so please explain this like I'm five? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2014-05-10 01:12 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- goggimoggi · 2014-05-10 01:13 Looks nice! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rickibalboa · 2014-05-10 07:12 Basically it's an IRC client that you can access from a web browser, but when you close it, it keeps your session active and replays messages when you get back. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- StoleAGoodUsername · 2014-05-10 15:46 I'm continually running into this problem with the install script Error: Cannot find module 'optimist' Any ideas? Full log here: http://pastebin.com/Y773wySq ---------------------------------------------------------------------- marcusramberg · 2014-05-10 16:32 How does this compare to Convos? (http://convos.by/) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SimplyTheDoctor007 · 2014-05-10 18:10 Interesting...I might have to use it in the future. Side Note: I posted my comment 20 hours ago...you replied 10 hours ago...I like that coincidence. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cheapshot · 2014-05-10 22:27 I would be totally into something like this if backlogs were made available for download.(Which I see you are thinking of adding from the sign up page) I think that is the only thing I really need that IRCCloud doesn't offer. I.e. I would pay for IRCCloud if it had that feature. I'll give this a look! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cheapshot · 2014-05-11 03:10 Can't seem to register or log in. Only me? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rickibalboa · 2014-05-11 08:10 I'm not sure, I don't include a module called 'optimist', try a 'npm install' manually! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rickibalboa · 2014-05-11 08:11 No, I haven't edited the page but it's currently disabled due to technical problems and no time to fix right now, sorry! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cheapshot · 2014-05-11 09:15 OK, thanks for letting me know. Looking forward to giving this a try. ((o(´∀｀)o))ﾜｸﾜｸ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rickibalboa · 2014-05-11 09:22 If you have any technical knowledge or a Linux machine (even a VM) it's really easy to install if you're really interested in trying it out. But until I get round to it the trial version won't work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cheapshot · 2014-05-11 09:45 I personally don't have any knowledge of this kind of thing. I'm merely a user. However, I do have my own private linux server which a system administrator keeps ticking over for me. I'll get in touch with him to see if he could install it. Thanks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2014-05-14 23:37 It's a great project, but like you said it needs a bit more work. I would definitely like to have this replace the rather crappy BNCs that I have on my own network. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cheapshot · 2014-06-04 06:05 Bit late on this again but I have a quick question: does this load backlog on scroll like IRCCloud? Cos that feature is what I really am missing with ZNC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rickibalboa · 2014-06-04 21:52 Yeah it does