UnrealIRCd

UnrealIRCd (Unreal IRC daemon) is an open source IRC server. Development of UnrealIRCd began in May of 1999. Unreal was created from the Dreamforge IRCd that was formerly used by the DALnet IRC Network. Over the years, many new and exciting features have been added to Unreal. It is hard to even see a resemblance between the current Unreal and Dreamforge.

Installing UnrealIRCd

Install the unrealircd package.

Configuring (mandatory)

Many of the settings you will want to set are very dependent on how you will use your IRC server. There is a default configuration but it does not work out of the box.

From there you will want to follow the UnrealIRCd Configuration docs making sure to configure all of the required fields such as me, admin, class, etc.

Place your TLS key/cert at /etc/unrealircd/tls/server.key.pem and /etc/unrealircd/tls/server.cert.pem. You can use Certbot to obtain a key and certificate, or generate a self-signed one as explained at Apache HTTP Server#TLS.

Starting/Stopping the daemon

You can start and stop the UnrealIRCd daemon with the unrealircd.service systemd unit.

If you run into problems where the daemon will not start, try running:

$ sudo -u ircd unrealircd

It will print out the errors and what line they occur on. Often errors are due to problems in your configuration.