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.

SEE ALSO

       irkerhook(1),

AUTHOR

       Eric S. Raymond esr@snark.thyrsus.com. See the project page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/irker for updates
       and other resources, including an installable repository hook script. The implementation uses the Python
       IRC library by Joe Rosdahl and Jason R. Coombs.

irker                                              04/30/2013                                          IRKERD(8)