Installation From Source

Warning:  Do not use tutorials from other websites such as Stack Overflow. They are almost always wrong and you will end up wasting a ton of time trying to work out why your server is broken. If you have any problems then ask for help at irc.inspircd.org #inspircd

Building and Installing InspIRCd

Download

There are two methods of obtaining the source code. You can either download the latest release or clone the source code from our Git repository.

Release

The most common way to install InspIRCd is by using a release tarball. To obtain this, first visit the downloads page. There you can obtain tarballs for release versions.

If you plan to build on a headless server you will probably need to use commands similar to the following in order to download and unpack the source:

wget https://github.com/inspircd/inspircd/archive/vX.Y.Z.tar.gz
tar xvf ./vX.Y.Z.tar.gz

Note if you are using a system that does not have GNU wget, such as Mac OS X, then you will need to replace wget in the above example with curl --remote-name.

Git

If you want to use the latest bleeding edge code then your best bet is to use Git to clone the InspIRCd repository.

This can be done using the following example:

git clone -b insp20 git://github.com/inspircd/inspircd.git

Note the source code in Git is often less stable than the source code in a release version. Make sure to tread carefully when using it.

Configure

To start, execute the ./configure script in the root directory of your InspIRCd install. You will be automatically prompted to answer a series of questions regarding the configuration of your server.

A number of options for non-interactive configuration are also available. These options vary between versions so you will need to check ./configure --help for a list of commands.

Make

Execute the make command to build the InspIRCd binaries. This should take under 10 minutes on a modern computer. Once make has finished executing, run `make install` to sort the InspIRCd files into the target directories that you set in the configure step.

Notes

Privileges

It is recommended that you add a user to run InspIRCd as and perform the compilation as that user. InspIRCd does not require root access to run but if you are installing system-wide you may need to use root (or sudo) to perform the install step.

Extra Modules

If you want to install an extra module you should place the source file in ./src/modules and rebuild. You can also use ModuleManager to install modules automatically from the inspircd-extras repository.