libirc-client - A minimalistic IRC library for building IRC clients

libirc-client is a minimalistic libray for building IRC clients, bots and bouncers in Node.js. It provides only basic IRC functionalities: connect, disconnect, send and receive messages.

Basic Usage

In the simplest case you can connect to an IRC server like so:

var irc = require('/path/to/lib/index.js'),
    connection;

connection = new irc.Connection();
connection.start({
    host: 'irc.freenode.net',
    nick: 'jdoe',
    user: 'jdoe',
    real: 'John Doe'
});

Sending Messages

There are many convenience methods, one for every IRC command. For example:

connection.join('#bots');
connection.privmsg('#bots', 'Hello, world!');
connection.part('#bots', 'Goodbye, all!');

A list of supported commands can be found in lib/commands.js. A semicolon to the last parameter is automatically added if necessary.

You can also send raw lines with the send() method. The string '\r\n' is automatically appended if not present.

Receiving Messages

Every message received emits an event. You must register to the event in order to handle the message. The name of the event is the name of the command as specified in the RFC but lowercase. For example:

connection.on('privmsg', function(from, to, message) {
    console.log(from + ': ' + message);
});
connection.on('rpl_nowaway', function() {
    console.log('You are now away');
});

The first parameter to the callback is an object describing the sender (nick, user, host). The subsequent parameters depend on the type of the message.

Everytime a message is received a 'line' event is emitted. Callbacks to this event receive as the only argument the line sent by the server.

Events

There are four main state events:

• connect: when the connection is established;
• close: emitted when the connection is closed.
• error: when an error occours;
• register: when the registration process has been completed;

Options

When starting a connection you can provide an option parameter that should specify:

• host: mandatory, specify the address of the server;
• port: if not specified the port is guessed on the basis of secure field;
• secure: boolean, true if you want secure connection;
• encoding: defaults to the string 'utf8';
• nick: mandatory, the nickname;
• user: mandatory, the username;
• real: mandatory, the real name of the user;
• auth: the authentication method to use;
• timeout: specify the socket timeout.

The auth parameter is an object that specify the authentication method. In the simplest case it is:

auth: {
    type: 'simple',
    password: null
}

Actually only simple and nickserv, and sasl methods are supported. For sasl you should supply additional parameters:

auth: {
    type: 'sasl',
    nick: 'jdoe',
    user: 'jdoe',
    password: 'supersecretpassword'
}

Other Features

The client maintains the state of the connection. There are three methods you can access:

• state(): the state of the connection (closed, connected, registered);
• nick(): user's current nickname;
• user(): username
• real(): user's real name;
• mode(): user's current mode flags;
• host(): host's name.

Note that the name of the methods nick(), user() and mode() conflict with the name of the convenience methods for the IRC commands NICK, USER and MODE. If you call these methods with no parameters you get the actual value of the nickname, username and the user mode flags set. If you call these methods with parameters you send commands to the server.

Further Documentation

Read RFC1459 and RFC2812.