📡 ft_irc

📝 Introduction

ft_irc is a 42 school project that consists of building a basic IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server, partially compliant with the RFC 1459 specification.

The goal of this project is to gain a deeper understanding of socket programming, network protocols, multiplexing with poll, and how a multi-client chat server operates behind the scenes.

Our server supports multiple simultaneous clients, user authentication, channel creation and management, private messages, an incredible bot and more features.

⚙️ Compilation

To compile the project, make sure you have a C++ compiler installed and simply run:

git clone https://github.com/your-username/ft_irc.git
cd ft_irc
make

Usability

1. To run the server and leave it waiting for client connections, run:

./ircserv <port> <password>

<port> is the port where the server listens for incoming connections.

<password> is the password that each new client must provide to authenticate with the server.

Now that the server is up and running, let's take a look at the main IRC commands supported by our server.

These commands can be typed directly in clients like Netcat or used automatically by IRC clients like HexChat.

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🔐 PASS <password>

This command is used to provide the server password upon connection.
It must be the first command sent by the client before any other.

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🧑 NICK <nickname>

Defines your nickname in the IRC network.

👤 USER <username> <hostname> <servername> <realname>

Sets the username and real name of the client.
For our server, the middle two fields can be anything (they're ignored).

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📥 JOIN <#channel>

Joins (or creates if it doesn't exist) a channel. Channels must start with #.

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📩 PRIVMSG <target> :<message>

Sends a private message to a user or to a channel.

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🚪 KICK <channel> <nickname> [:reason]

Removes a user from the channel.

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📩 INVITE <nickname> <channel>

Invites a user to a channel that is marked as invite-only.

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⚙️ MODE

Used to change the channel's settings.

Mode flags:

• +o / -o — Give/remove operator status
• +t / -t — Only operators can set the channel topic
• +l — Set a user limit
• +i — Set channel as invite-only
• +k — Set a password (key) to enter the channel

3 - Now that we know how to use the commands, we can create a connection using either Netcat or HexChat.

You can connect nc using:

• Netcat (nc) — a simple command-line tool used to manually test the server by sending IRC commands:

  nc localhost <port>

• HexChat:

To connect with HexChat, simply edit the server IP and port to localhost and the port you chose when starting the server.