16

Challenge 16 - Write Your Own IRC Client

This challenge corresponds to the sixteenth part of the Coding Challenges series by John Crickett https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-irc.

Table of contents

• Description
• Usage
• Run tests
• TODOs

Description

The IRC client is written using the net module of Node.js. You can find more about the IRC protocol from https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2812.

• command-types.ts: Command types returned by server and supported by client
• parser.ts: A parser class that parses the data sent by server into a more usable message interface
• types.ts: All the interface definitions are present in this file
• utils.ts: Utility functions used by IRC client
• irc-client.ts: The main IRC Client login is written here.
• irc-client.index.ts: A command line interface for IRC Client to interact with the server

The IRC Client supports file based logging via winston

The following commands are supported by the IRC Client:

• JOIN
• PART
• NICK
• PRIVMSG
• QUIT

Usage

To use the IRC Client command line interface, you can update the following variables present in irc-client.index.ts and use the ts-node command to start the client.

const host = 'irc.freenode.net';
const port = 6667;
const nickName = 'MJ'; // Use you nickname
const fullName = 'Mohit Jain'; // Use your full name
const debug = true; // Enable winston logging

npx ts-node irc-client.index.ts

The following commands are supported by the IRC Client:

# Connect to server
client>connect

# Join a channel
client>/join <channel-name>

# Leave a channel
client>/part <channel-name>

# Change your nickname
client>/nick <new-nickname>

# Send a message to a channel
client>/privmsg <channel-name> <message>

# Quit the IRC Client
client>/quit

You can also use the IRC Client Class in your own code by importing it from irc-client.ts.

import IRCClient from './irc-client';

// logger is an instance of winston.Logger otherwise undefined
const client = new IRCClient(host, port, nickName, fullName, debug, logger);

// Connect the client to the server
await client.connect();

// Join a channel
await client.join([{ channel: '#cc' }]);

// Send message to a channel
client.privateMessage('#cc', 'Hello World!');

// Part a channel
await client.part({ channels: ['#cc'], partMessage: 'Bye Bye' });

// Update your nickname
await client.nick('MJ');

// Quit the server
await client.quit('Bye Bye');

// Get details about a channel
const channelDetails = client.getChannelDetails('#cc');

You can add listeners to different command types supported by the IRC Client. The client exposes the on() method as mentioned in types.ts.

Run tests

To run the tests for the IRC Client, go to the root directory of this repository and run the following command:

npm test src/16/

TODOs

• Add support for multiple channels for JOIN and PART commands.
• Add command line option support for irc-client.index.ts.
• Separate the command handling from the main IRC client code into more a structured and scalable format.
• Improve tests.