To install UnrealIRCd on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X and other *NIX systems you generally compile and install from source. In addition to that you will also need to configure UnrealIRCd. This page explains how to do all that. Even if you are completely new to UnrealIRCd then all these steps to get the IRCd up and running shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes in total.

Don’t run as root

Be sure to build and run the IRCd as a regular user and not as root. If you are on a VPS / root shell then create a user ‘unrealircd’ or similar (sudo adduser unrealircd) and do all steps below as that user (login as user ‘unrealircd’). See also Do not run as root.

Grab the source (.tar.gz)

From the shell

Connect to the *NIX server via SSH. All the following commands execute on the *NIX server.

wget https://www.unrealircd.org/downloads/unrealircd-latest.tar.gz

On FreeBSD you may have to use:

fetch https://www.unrealircd.org/downloads/unrealircd-latest.tar.gz

If neither works, for example you get an ‘unknown command’ then you should install the ‘wget’ package on your system or try uploading (see next).

Alternative: uploading to shell

You can also choose to download the .tar.gz of UnrealIRCd via your browser, save it to disk, and then upload it to the shell via SCP or SFTP.

Extract the source

Extract the .tar.gz and enter the unrealircd-x.y.z directory:

tar xfz unrealircd-latest.tar.gz
rm -rf unrealircd-latest.tar.gz
cd unrealircd-5.* (check your version)
./Config

NOTE: There’s some logic here. If the file is called, say, unrealircd-5.0.0.tar.gz then it will extract to the unrealircd-5.0.0/ directory. As you can see, the directory name is different for each release to make sure you don’t accidentally overwrite your existing installation.

Compiling

First, run the ./Config script which will ask a number of questions. You can just press Enter to accept the default answers.

./Config

Now, compile UnrealIRCd by running make, this may take a minute (or two):

make

Finally, run make install (important!):

make install

Creating a configuration file

1. Change to the installed UnrealIRCd directory, this is /home/yourusername/unrealircd by default (For more information on the directory structure see UnrealIRCd files and directories).

   cd ~/unrealircd

2. Copy conf/example/example.conf to your conf/ directory and rename it to unrealircd.conf

   [email protected]:~/unrealircd$ cp conf/examples/example.conf conf/unrealircd.conf

Upgrading