Ubuntu Manpage: irkerd - relay for shipping notifications to IRC servers

Provided by: irker_1.17+dfsg-3ubuntu1_all

NAME

       irkerd - relay for shipping notifications to IRC servers

SYNOPSIS

       irkerd [-d debuglevel] [-V]

DESCRIPTION

irkerd is a specialized write-only IRC client intended to be used for shipping
notification messages to IRC channels. The use case in mind when it was designed was
broadcasting notifications from commit hooks in version-control systems.

irkerd is a socket server that listens on for UDP or TCP packets on port 6659 for textual
request lines containing JSON objects and terminated by a newline. Each JSON object must
have two members: "to" specifying a destination or destination list, and "privmsg"
specifying the message text. Examples:

{"to":"irc://chat.freenode.net/git-ciabot", "privmsg":"Hello, world!"}
{"to":["irc://chat.freenode.net/#git-ciabot","irc://chat.freenode.net/#gpsd"],"privmsg":"Multichannel test"}
{"to":"irc://chat.hypothetical.net:6668/git-ciabot", "privmsg":"Hello, world!"}

If the channel part of the URL does not have one of the prefix characters “#”, “&”, or
“+”, a “#” will be prepended to it before shipping - unlessthe channel part has the suffix
",isnick" (which is unconditionally removed).

The host part of the URL may have a port-number suffix separated by a colon, as shown in
the third example; otherwise irkerd sends messages to the the default 6667 IRC port of
each server.

An empty message is legal and will cause irkerd to join the target channels without
actually emitting a message. This may be useful for advertising that an instance is up and
running.

OPTIONS

       irkerd takes the following options:

       -d
           Takes a following value, setting the debugging level from it. This option will
           generally only be of interest to developers; consult the source code for details.

       -V
           Write the program version to stdout and terminate.

LIMITATIONS

       Requests via UDP optimizes for lowest latency and network load by avoiding TCP connection
       setup time; the cost is that delivery is not reliable in the face of packet loss.

       An irkerd instance with a publicly-accessible request socket could complicate blocking of
       IRC spam by making it easy for spammers to submit while hiding their IP addresses; the
       better way to deploy, then, is on places like project-hosting sites where the irkerd
       socket can be visible from commit-hook code but not exposed to the outside world. Priming
       your firewall with blocklists of IP addresses known to spew spam is always a good idea.

       The absence of any option to set the service port is deliberate. If you think you need to
       do that, you have a problem better solved at your firewall.

       IRC has a message length limit of 510 bytes; generate your privmsg attribute values with
       appropriate care.

       IRC ignores any text after an embedded newline. Be aware that irkerd will turn payload
       strings with embedded newlines into multiple IRC sends to avoid having message data
       discarded.

AUTHOR