ircd-micro is an attempt to write a basic TS6 IRC daemon from scratch. This was done more as a personal challenge rather than as a real practical project.

The goal is to serve as a solid base for researching IRC software, providing a lightweight framework within which to build a more robust IRCD.

The official ircd-micro channel is #micro on irc.interlinked.me. I will be using one of many nicknames, but will definitely have +o. Users with +o are contributors.

If this source has been obtained via git, the following commands should be run first:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

You will need to run git submodule update for each successive pull. ircd-micro can be then compiled and installed using the typical sequence:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

By default, ircd-micro will be installed into ~/ircd, but this can be changed with the --prefix argument to ./configure.

Invoke ircd-micro with -h to get a list of options. By default, configuration goes in etc/micro.conf relative to the current directiory. An example configuration file can be found in doc/micro.conf.example

Since ircd-micro is still in the very early stages of development, a lot of the active coding work is related to the organizational structure of the codebase, and I only plan to accept patches which I feel fit into my plan for that.

That being said, there is still a lot of coding work that can be done. I'm currently using GitHub's "Issues" feature to keep track of tasks that need to be completed before the 1.0 release of ircd-micro. I've marked tasks that I would be willing to accept outside help for with the label "open". I will consider patches for other components as well, but I would really like those to be discussed with me ahead of time, since I probably already have something planned in that area and would like to be involved in the design of that component.

This project used to be an attempt to build an IRCD for the 4.3 BSD operating system. However, the project matured and its direction changed, and this aspect of the design was beginning to become an obstruction. In a 4.3 BSD system, there is no SSL, no dynamic loading, no robust crypt() implementation, no vsnprintf(), no C89 compiler, no make with Makefile inclusion, and many other limitations and idiosyncracies. It started to get in the way of meaningful progress.

This project still exists, in spirit, at aji/bsdchat. I will, from time to time, backport features patches from ircd-micro to bsdchat, so general IRCD features should be targeted to ircd-micro. Obviously, BSD-specific patches should be submitted to the bsdchat project.