kythera: services for IRC networks
Copyright (c) 2011 Eric Will <rakaur@malkier.net>
Rights to this code are documented in doc/license.md
This application is free but copyrighted software; see doc/license.md.
To start the program, edit the configuration options in bin/kythera to
your satisfaction and run ./bin/kythera at your terminal. Good luck!
More information and code repositories can be found on GitHub.
Kythera is a set of services for IRC networks. Kythera is extremely extensible
and is not limited to providing a specific set of services such as NickServ,
ChanServ vs. Undernet-style X, etc. You can configure the service to offer
pretty much anything you want. If it's not there, you can easily add support
for it if you know Ruby.
Ruby also brings us to my next point. Many people have told me that IRC services must be implemented in C in order to have any hope of keeping up with medium- to large-sized networks. I disagree. I actually spent a good amount of time benchmarking various Ruby implementations to make sure this wasn't a silly project. Having previously implemented services in C myself, I think I'm quite qualified to judge the situation. In most cases, Ruby was reasonably competitive with, and sometimes faster than traditional services written in C.
Most people running ircd are sysadmins that may know some dynamic languages like Python and Ruby, but probably not static languages like C. It's my hope that Kythera can compete on performance, and obliterate the competition on ease-of-use and ease-of-hacking.
Ruby supports the following command-line options to modify its runtime behavior:
|------------+-------+--------------------|
| option | short | action |
|------------|-------|--------------------|
| --debug | -d | debug mode |
| --help | -h | print usage info |
| --no-fork | -n | run in foreground |
| --quiet | -q | disable logging |
| --version | -v | print version info |
|------------+-------+--------------------|
Kythera has been extensively tested with multiple Ruby implementations. Kythera runs on all MRI / CRuby implementations, and will also run on Rubinius and JRuby so long as you upgrade the bundled RubyGems version to at least 1.8.0.
|----------------+-----------|
| implementation | version |
|----------------|-----------|
| mri / cruby | 1.8.7 |
| mri / yarv | 1.9.2 |
| mri / yarv | 1.9.3 |
| rubinius | 1.2, 2.0 |
| jruby | 1.6.5 |
|----------------+-----------|
I had to find and report some bugs in JRuby to get Kythera to run on it, so only very recent revisions work, and as of this writing, no official release works out of the box. If you're using RVM, do this:
$ rvm install jruby-head --branch jruby-1_6
$ rvm use jruby-head
$ gem install rubygems-update
$ update_rubygems
If all of these work out, Kythera should run normally on JRuby excepting
background mode. JRuby does not provide the Process.fork call, and so it will
run in the foreground. You can background it using nohup:
$ nohup bin/kythera -n &
This will background it and redirect all output to nohup.out.
This application has the following requirements:
|------------+---------|
| dependency | version |
|------------|---------|
| sqlite | 3.7.6 |
| rubygems | 1.8.0 |
|------------+---------|
This application requires the following RubyGems:
|---------+---------| |----------------------------------|
| rubygem | version | | jruby rubygems |
|---------|---------| |----------------------------------|
| rake | 0.9.2 | | activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter |
| sequel | 3.27.0 | | jdbc-sqlite3 |
| sqlite3 | 1.3.4 | | jruby-openssl |
|---------+---------| |----------------------------------|
Rake is required for testing and other automated tasks. Sequel and sqlite3 are required for database management. These gems are widely available and should not be a problem.
If you want to run the unit tests you'll also need to install riot:
$ gem install riot
$ rake test
Kythera is very modular and ships with support for many IRCds. In addition, due to its extensible design, adding support to IRCds is a fairly easy task.
|--------------+-------------+----------|
| ircd | version | protocol |
|--------------|-------------|----------+
| charybdis | 3.2.1 | ts6 |
| InspIRCd | 1.2.8 | inspircd |
| ircd-ratbox | 2.2.9 | ts6 |
| ircu | 2.10.12.14 | p10 |
| UnrealIRCd | 3.2.8.1 | unreal |
|--------------+-------------+----------|
Other TS6-based IRCds might work. For now, the TS6 module only provides support for TS6-only networks. If you link a non-TS6 server, Kythera will ignore it.
Kythera will probably run anywhere that Ruby will run. Platforms like Windows
don't have the fork system call, and so it will not run in the background.
The application is written primarily on Mac OS X 10.7.2, and frequently tested
on FreeBSD 8.2 and Linux 2.6.37.2. If you have any trouble running the
application that you think is operating system related, please file
an issue on GitHub.
This application is completely original. I'm sure to receive patches from other contributors from time to time, and this will be indicated in SCM commits.
|----------------+----------+--------------------+-------------------------|
| role | nickname | realname | email address |
|----------------|----------|--------------------|-------------------------|
| Lead Developer | rakaur | Eric Will | rakaur@malkier.net |
| Developer | andrew | Andrew Herbig | goforit7arh@gmail.com |
| Developer | sycobuny | Stephen Belcher | sbelcher@gmail.com |
| Contributor | xiphias | Michael Rodriguez | xiphias@khaydarin.net |
| Tester | rintaun | Matt Lanigan | rintaun@projectxero.net |
|----------------+----------+--------------------+-------------------------|
We're not promising any hard and fast support, but we'll try to do our best. This is a hobby and we've enjoyed it, but we have real lives with real jobs and real families. We cannot devote major quantities of time to this.
With that said, our email addresses are listed above. If you prefer real-time you can try IRC. We run a small #kythera channel on freenode, and we also run an extremely small privateish network at irc.malkier.net, #malkier.
If you have a bug feel free to drop by IRC or what have you, but we'll probably just ask you to file an issue on GitHub. Please provide any output you have, such as a backtrace. Please provide the steps we can take in order to reproduce this problem, if possible. Feature requests are welcome and can be filed in the same manner.
If you've read this far, congratulations. You are among the few elite people that actually read documentation. Thank you.