rust-irc/README.md

irc

A robust, thread-safe and async-friendly library for IRC clients in Rust. It's compliant with RFC 2812, IRCv3.1, IRCv3.2, and includes some additional, common features. It also includes a number of useful built-in features to faciliate rapid development of clients. You can find up-to-date, ready-to-use documentation online here. The documentation is generated with the default features. These are, however, strictly optional and can be disabled accordingly.

Getting Started

To start using this library with cargo, you can simply add irc = "0.12" to your dependencies in your Cargo.toml file. You'll likely want to take a look at some of the examples, as well as the documentation. You'll also be able to find below a small template to get a feel for the library.

Getting Started by Example

extern crate irc;

use std::default::Default;
use irc::client::prelude::*;

fn main() {
    let cfg = Config {
        nickname: Some(format!("irc-rs")),
        server: Some(format!("irc.example.com")),
        channels: Some(vec![format!("#test")]),
        .. Default::default()
    };
    let server = IrcServer::from_config(cfg).unwrap();
    server.identify().unwrap();
    server.for_each_incoming(|message| {
        // Do message processing.
    }).unwrap()
}

It may not seem like much, but all it takes to get started with an IRC connection is the stub above. In just a few lines, you can be connected to a server and processing IRC messages as you wish. The library is built with flexibility in mind. If you need to work on multiple threads, simply clone the server and have at it. We'll take care of the rest.

You'll probably find that programmatic configuration is a bit of a chore, and you'll often want to be able to change the configuration between runs of the program (for example, to change the server that you're connecting to). Fortunately, runtime configuration loading is straightforward.

extern crate irc;

use irc::client::prelude::*;

fn main() {
    let server = IrcServer::new("config.toml").unwrap();
    server.identify().unwrap();
    server.for_each_incoming(|message| {
        // Do message processing.
    }).unwrap()
}

Configuration

Like the rest of the IRC crate, configuration is built with flexibility in mind. You can easily create Config objects programmatically and choose your own methods for handling any saving or loading of configuration required. However, for convenience, we've also included the option of loading files with serde to write configurations. By default, we support JSON and TOML. As of 0.12.4, TOML is the preferred configuration format. We have bundled a conversion tool as convertconf in the examples. In a future version, we will likely disable JSON by default. Additionally, you can enable the optional yaml feature to get support for YAML as well. All the configuration fields are optional, and thus any of them can be omitted (though, omitting a nickname or server will cause the program to fail for obvious reasons).

Here's an example of a complete configuration in TOML:

owners = []
nickname = "user"
nick_password = "password"
alt_nicks = ["user_", "user__"]
username = "user"
realname = "Test User"
server = "chat.freenode.net"
port = 6697
password = ""
use_ssl = true
cert_path = "cert.der"
encoding = "UTF-8"
channels = ["#rust", "#haskell", "#fake"]
umodes = "+RB-x"
user_info = "I'm a test user for the Rust IRC crate."
version = "irc:git:Rust"
source = "https://github.com/aatxe/irc"
ping_time = 180
ping_timeout = 10
burst_window_length = 8
max_messages_in_burst = 15
should_ghost = false
ghost_sequence = []

[channel_keys]
"#fake" = "password"

[options]
note = "anything you want can be in here!"
and = "you can use it to build your own additional configuration options."
key = "value"

You can convert between different configuration formats with convertconf like so:

cargo run --example convertconf -- -i client_config.json -o client_config.toml

Note that the formats are automatically determined based on the selected file extensions. This tool should make it easy for users to migrate their old configurations to TOML.

Contributing

Contributions to this library would be immensely appreciated. Prior to version 0.12.0, this library was public domain. As of 0.12.0, this library is offered under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 whose text can be found in LICENSE.md. Fostering an inclusive community around irc is important, and to that end, we've adopted the Contributor Convenant.