From the makers of InspIRCd.

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Contents 1 Installing InspIRCd on Linux or BSD, a Newbie's Guide 1.1 Before You Begin 1.2 Connecting To The Shell Service 1.3 Downloading the ircd source code 1.4 Compiling the ircd source code 1.5 Creating The Configuration File 1.6 Launching The IRCd

Installing InspIRCd on Linux or BSD, a Newbie's Guide

This tutorial aims to introduce users to InspIRCd who may be new to ircds, and new to Linux and shell hosting packages. By following this guide you should be able to get InspIRCd up and running with a minimum of hassle even if you have never used Linux before.

You should have a reasonable knowledge of IRC (e.g. what the /oper command does and what the /connect command does), and a reasonable knowledge of windows before you begin this tutorial. Prior knowledge of Linux is optional, as we will attempt to give a crash course in Linux as we progress through this guide. A little prior experience of InspIRCd would help too, either as an oper on an InspIRCd network, or as a user of the Windows build of InspIRCd.

Throughout this tutorial it is assumed that you are running Microsoft Windows. Parts of this guide carry over well to users using Linux as their desktop, so long as the parts about downloading and using PuTTY are skipped.

Before You Begin

Before commencing with this guide, you should ensure that you have each of the following:

1. An internet connection
2. An account with a shell service running Linux or FreeBSD which has GCC 3 or higher, SSH, wget, nano, and Perl 5.6 or higher and must allow ircd accounts (Please ask your shell provider if they have this before signing up). A shell service is a type of hosting package which will host your IRC server for you. You cannot use a web hosting package for this. You should have the following details to hand for this tutorial, provided by your shell provider; SSH username, SSH password, SSH hostname or IP, IRC IP address you are allowed to use.
3. Patience and a willingness to learn new things
4. The PuTTY SSH client, used to connect to the shell service from your PC.

Connecting To The Shell Service

Begin by loading the PuTTY program. This program allows you to connect via SSH to the shell hosting server. Once PuTTY is loaded you will see a screen similar to the one below:

Enter the SSH hostname or IP in the box on PuTTY marked 'hostname or IP', and select the option for 'SSH' on port 22. The Port field will be filled in with 22 as shown above.

Now, click the 'open' button at the bottom of the window. After a few seconds, if you entered the right details, you will be prompted with a window like the one below. Simply click on 'yes' to allow the connection.

You will be prompted for a username and password, enter them as they were given by your shell provider, each is case sensitive, as shown in the image below:

Downloading the ircd source code

If you get the details correct (as you should, unless your hoster gave you the wrong details!) you will be presented with a screen like the one below. Linux and BSD are command-prompt driven operating systems similar to DOS, which means you must type your instructions line by line, rather than clicking with the mouse, to have the operating system carry them out. All commands and parameters to the commands are case sensitive.

Use the wget command to fetch the ircd tarball from our website:

wget "http://www.inspircd.org/?p=download"

If this goes as planned, you will see output similar to that below:

Note down the filename which has been retrieved, you will need this later.

Compiling the ircd source code

Use the three commands below to unzip the program, change into its directory, and launch its setup program, commonly known as a configure script. You should execute all three by typing them and pressing enter, in this order only:

tar xjvf InspIRCd-1.2.0.tar.bz2
cd inspircd
./configure

Please note that depending on the version of the ircd you download, the first command above will have a different filename in it. You can see the filename you have fetched from the output of 'wget', above.

For simplicity of this tutorial, simply accept the default values for all configure script questions by pressing enter. This will configure your ircd for a generic setup.

Once the configure script has completed, type

make install

To compile the ircd. On a Linux or BSD system, most programs can be compiled from source code (as opposed to coming in pre-compiled installers) which allows for portability of programs to different systems.

Once you type this command, output will start to scroll by. This can take half an hour or more to complete on an especially slow system, so now is a good time to take a quick break, maybe come visit our channel at irc.inspircd.org for a friendly chat about IRCds.

Creating The Configuration File

Once the build is complete, you should copy the example configuration file into the config directory using the command:

cp conf/inspircd.conf.example conf/inspircd.conf

You can now edit this configuration file. For beginners, the editor 'nano' is recommended, so simply type:

nano conf/inspircd.conf

This will present you with a text mode editor. You may use the same basic keys as you would expect to use in any editor such as the cursor keys, insert, delete, page up and page down. When you have finished, simply press CTRL+X to exit the editor. You will be prompted to save the file, simply press Y or N as appropriate.

Here it is recommended that for starters you edit only the lines starting with <server, <bind and the lines starting with <oper. As you become more experienced you will get more adventerous and will edit more of the configuration file. In the bind lines, in the address="" values, only use the IP allowed for IRC, given to you by your hosting provider. If you leave this blank, then your ircd will try and claim all IPs on the hosting server, likely annoying the server's administrator. If you get the IP entirely wrong, you will find yourself unable to connect to your ircd when you are done.

The bind values indicate which IP and ports the ircd should listen on, and the oper tags indicate opers who can use the /OPER command to oper up on IRC.

It is very useful at this point to read some of our Configuration section of our wiki which guides you through the configuration file in much more detail, including what each option does and what values it accepts.

You should also remember to remove lines starting with <die which halt the server on purpose if they are left in the configuration file.

You also should edit modules.conf.example, opers.conf.example and links.conf.example.

nano conf/links.conf.example
nano conf/modules.conf.example
nano conf/opers.conf.example

Launching The IRCd

When you have finished the previous steps, it is now time to launch your IRCd. If you have done the other steps correctly, you will receive output like the output in the screenshots below.

To start InspIRCd simply type:

./inspircd start

from within the directory where you ran 'make install' and the other commands. In the future, to start your IRCd if it is stopped, you can simply repeat this one command from within the inspircd directory.

Viola, successful startup!

... Of course, if you don't get this output first time, do not feel disheartened. Read the error, and see if you can figure out for yourself what the problem is and fix it. If you simply cannot figure this out, then just ask for help on our IRC channel or on our forums!

Enjoy your new IRC server!

You can connect to your IRC server by connecting to it in your client, using the IP address of your IRC server which was given to you by your hosting provider.