This tutorial provides a simple guide for setting up your WeeChat environment with ZNC for chatting and logging on IRC. We first cover WeeChat installation. We then explain how to register your username with NickServ on FreeNode and OFTC. Finally, we show how to configure your WeeChat to work with ZNC.

Introduction

Internet Relay Chat, or simply IRC, is a protocol for text communication amongst humans on the internet. FLOSS communities often use IRC due to its simplicity, plain text format, and just outright stubbornness from the programming community. One may find official channels for many free software communities, such as FreeBSD, Debian, Arch Linux and a bunch of channels for different submodules in the Linux Kernel. There are many ways to chat on IRC. Options include graphical applications such as HexChat, web clients (KiwiIRC), or ncurses clients like irssi and WeeChat.

Now, why use IRC when you can have any other “hip”, “trending”, chat protocol that eats up your RAM with their Electron clone of Chromium or data mines you, selling your private information to marketing companies? Well, one could argue that they just want a simple text chat protocol that works in their Commodore64. Or maybe they just want a place where they can find any kind of interesting content, from a channel where you can only say sentences that have never been said before (irc.foonetic.net, #xkcd-signal), to one where you can only say sentences that have been said before (irc.foonetic.net, #xkcd-noise). Regardless of their niche reasons, IRC is definitely the place to get in touch with the free software community and almost instantaneously get help and advice from grizzled veterans of the programming community.

In this tutorial, we provide a guide on how to enter the wonderful world of IRC through WeeChat, a highly customizable ncurses IRC client. We then show how to register your username through NickServ. Finally, we replace directly connecting to IRC servers with a ZNC bouncer.

WeeChat

WeeChat is available in various shapes and forms. Remote interfaces for WeeChat include a web version, an Android app, a Qt GUI and even as an Emacs plugin (shivers). However, in this tutorial we will be covering only the ncurses, official version, which should look somewhat like this:

WeeChat should be available in most package managers. A list of packages for Debian, Ubuntu and Raspbian are available on their site.

For Arch Linux, a community package is available as weechat.

Alternatively, you may download the source and compile it yourself.

I won’t cover usage of WeeChat on this tutorial. That is up to you. Here are the FAQ, Quick Start Guide and User Guide. Highly recommend reading the Quick Start Guide and configuring your WeeChat now before proceeding. The FAQ and User Guide are decent as reference guides.

If you’re using a Window Manager like i3 you may not receive notifications when being “pinged” (i.e. someone calls you by your username). This is because some window managers don’t come with any notification daemons installed by default. To fix this, you may either install a notification daemon by some Desktop Environment (like GNOME) or install Dunst. Dunst is a lightweight notification daemon that fits well into minimalistic window managers like i3.

In Arch Linux, Dunst can be easily installed through pacman.

pacman -S dunst

Setting up a notification agent on WeeChat can be done through plugins. Here are some. Some are text-only and others are able to play a sound when pinged.

You can install a plugin via the /script command. As an example, we’ll install the autosort.py script, that groups channels with same server together and sorts them alphabetically (though the sorting criteria is customizable), and which I highly recommend having in your WeeChat environment.

/script install autosort.py
/script autoload autosort.py

This’ll install and start the autosort.py plugin for every WeeChat session. In the case of autosort.py, we’ll also have to unmerge how WeeChat organizes buffers.

/set irc.look.server_buffer independent

Once you’ve set everything to your taste, let us add FreeNode and OFTC as servers.

/server add freenode irc.freenode.net
/server add oftc irc.oftc.net
/save

And connect to FreeNode.

/connect freenode

Now we shall begin registering your username on…

NickServ

NickServ is an IRC bot with the goal of registering and managing users and their nicknames. Its channel equivalent ChanServ does the same, but for (duh) channels. You can read more about nickname registration here.

IRC is a free-for-all, first-come-first-served anarchic mayhem. That means anyone can have any username if it is not registered with NickServ. That’s why we highly recommend registering yours. Here’s how:

Go to the freenode buffer on WeeChat. Once there, register your username with NickServ.

First enter your desired nickname through the /nick command.

/nick nickname

Then, send a private message to NickServ asking to register your current nickname to your email.

/msg NickServ REGISTER password name@email.com

Read carefully what NickServ has to say and follow the instructions. Once you’ve done that, do the same with OFTC. Note that NickServ on OFTC has a slightly different syntax. For REGISTER though, they are both identical.

In the case of OFTC’s read extra carefully what they have to say once you’ve entered your REGISTER request. You’ll have to go to their website and manually verify your account.

Done! You’re registered with NickServ. Now, let’s get you on…

ZNC

ZNC is a free, open-source IRC bouncer. What that means is that, instead of connecting to the servers (e.g. FreeNode or OFTC) directly, you connect to a ZNC server. The ZNC server, in turn, connects you to the IRC servers.

Now, why would we want that? Well, for starters, if you have used IRC before, you may have noticed that once you shutdown your client, you are no longer connected to the servers. That means you get no messages from other users when you’re offline, nor can others reach you. And if you haven’t registered your username on NickServ, your username is now free for the taking!

So what a bouncer does is keep you always online. ZNC, for its part, allows multiple users sharing the same server, provides a simple web UI, allows configuring multiple networks and channels, and also has a variety of modules that make an IRCer life much more comfortable.

FLUSP runs a ZNC bouncer on its server. You can access it through its web UI.

Now ask any FLUSP-Infra contributor to create your account.

Once your account has been created, log in and change your password through your settings page. Press Save and continue on the bottom of the page. We are now going to configure your ZNC account.

The IRC Information section contains basic IRC information. Change your Nickname to the one you set during the NickServ section.

• Alt. Nickname is the nickname the IRC server is going to assign to you if Nickname is already taken;
• Ident and Realname are ID names that nobody uses, so you can leave them as is;
• Quit Message is what is going to be printed when you leave a channel.

Head over to the next section Networks and press Add. We’re now going to add the FreeNode network.

Set Network Name as freenode and Nickname as your FreeNode NickServ chosen nickname. On Servers of this IRC network, add chat.freenode.net 6667. The Channels section allows you to add channels to your ZNC configuration. Click Add and add the #ccsl-usp channel to the network. I recommend a 500 buffer count for this particular channel. Press Add Channel and return.

Head over to the Modules section and tick nickserv. On the text field next to it, insert your NickServ password you set earlier. Once done that, press Add network and return on the bottom of the page.

Your Network section should look something like this:

Click Add to add the OFTC network. Do the same as FreeNode, but with Network Name as oftc and Servers of this IRC network as

irc.oftc.net 6667
irc.oftc.net 6668
irc.oftc.net 6670
irc.oftc.net 7000

instead. Add the #kernelnewbies channel and do the same with the nickserv module as we did before with FreeNode. Save and return.

That’s it! Well, at least from the ZNC UI’s side. Head back to WeeChat and let’s add the ZNC server networks.

Integrating WeeChat with ZNC

We are now going to add each ZNC network at a time. Let’s first add FreeNode.

/server add znc_freenode flusp.ime.usp.br/1212 -ssl -username=username/freenode -password=password -autoconnect

Where username and password are your username and password set with NickServ.

/connect znc_freenode
/save

You should now be connected with FreeNode. Now let’s do the same for OFTC.

/server add znc_oftc flusp.ime.usp.br/1212 -ssl -username=username/oftc -password=password -autoconnect
/connect znc_oftc
/save

And now you’re connected to OFTC!

And there you go! You are connected to ZNC and able to chat through WeeChat.

Integrating other IRC clients with ZNC

If you use other IRC client than Weechat, you may configure a new account for freenode with the following parameters:

• Server: flusp.ime.usp.br
• Port: 1212
• Nick: your nick
• Password: username/freenode:password
• Use SSL

Feel free to add networks and channels to your ZNC account if you want to. If ZNC complains about having a network limit, ask a FLUSP-Infra contributor to raise yours.

Have fun IRCing! See you on #ccsl-usp!