IRC Developer Docs

This set of documentation describes the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol. The docs are written to give developers a good footing when writing software that uses or interacts with IRC.

This documentation takes on a lot of structure from something like the MDN Web Docs, which documents web technology instead.

Building

The ircdocs config file creates the main site. The bare config file exports the pages without headers/footers and is used when plugging the content into other sites.

when writing docs

bundle exec jekyll serve -w --config _config-ircdocs.yml

building

bundle exec jekyll b --config _config-ircdocs.yml

Documentation Structure

Here's the rough breakdown of what's included here:

• Tech References
  • Command Reference
  • Numeric Reference
  • Glossary
• Guides

Future

Some stuff I want to describe very explicitly in future include:

• Hostname masking/cloaking
• Virtual Hosts
• refs/modes/c/invite-only and etc, modes/c for chan and modes/u for user modes, check the join command ref for links
• refs/isupport/chanlimit and etc

Other References

Here are some other IRC references that devs may find useful:

• IRCv3 Working Group
• ircdocs generally

What can I do with this?

The project's license file lays this out in detail, but as a non-normative summary we've designed the license so that:

• If anyone modifies or builds on top of the content in this repo, we can pull those changes back into this project under this project's license.
• If anyone wants to take any of the content in this repo and pull it into the IETF process (for example, writing a new RFC describing the IRC protocol), they can do that and the content they use will be under the IETF contributor license terms.