ngIRCd
ngIRCd is a free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server for small or private networks, developed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The server is quite easy to configure and runs as a single-node server or can be part of a network of ngIRCd servers in a LAN or across the internet. It optionally supports the IPv6 protocol, SSL/TLS-protected client-server and server-server links, the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) system for user authentication, IDENT requests, and character set conversion for legacy clients.
The name ngIRCd stands for next-generation IRC daemon, which is a little bit exaggerated: lightweight Internet Relay Chat server most probably would have been a better name :-)
Advantages and strengths
- Well arranged (lean) configuration file.
- Simple to build, install, configure, and maintain.
- Supports IPv6 and SSL.
- Can use PAM for user authentication.
- Lots of popular user and channel modes are implemented.
- Supports "cloaking" of users.
- No problems with servers that have dynamic IP addresses.
- Freely available, modern, portable and tidy C source.
- Wide field of supported platforms, including AIX, A/UX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Windows with WSL or Cygwin.
- ngIRCd has been in development for 23 years.
ngircd --help
Simplicity
After installing ngIRCd (which is best done with the package manager of
the operating system or directly from the source code, see
INSTALL.md) and adjusting the configuration
in the ngircd.conf
file, the IRC server can be ready for
use after just 5 minutes - only a few lines need to be changed
there, the rest is optional and can be used with the default values.