ZNC - An advanced IRC bouncer
=============================

Table of contents:
- Minimal Requirements
- Optional Requirements
- Installing ZNC
- Setting up znc.conf
- Special config options
- Using ZNC
- File Locations
- ZNC's config file
- Writing own modules
- Further infos

Minimal Requirements
--------------------

Core:
 - GNU make (try gmake if make fails)
 - GCC 3 or later

Optional Requirements
---------------------

SSL support:
 - openssl 0.9.7d or later (try installing openssl-dev or openssl-devel)
modperl:
 - This needs perl and the bundled libperl
saslauth:
 - This module needs cyrus-sasl2

Installing ZNC
--------------

Installation is done with the ./configure ; make ; make install commands.

You can use
  ./configure --help
if you want to get a list of options, though the defaults should be suiting
most needs. After you compiled it with make (or gmake if make doesnt work) you
can install it with
 make install
though you don't need to as ZNC supports in-place execution.

Setting up znc.conf
-------------------

For setting up a configuration file in ~/.znc you can simply do
 znc --makeconf
or
 ./znc --makeconf
for in-place execution.

If you are using SSL you should do
 znc --makepem

Special config options
----------------------

When you create your ZNC configuration file via --makeconf, you are asked two
questions which might not be easy to understand.

> Number of lines to buffer per channel
How many messages should be buffered for each channel. When you connect to ZNC
you get a buffer replay for each channel which shows what was said last. This
option selects the number of lines this replay should consist of. Increasing
this can greatly increase ZNC's memory usage if you are hosting many users.
The default value should be fine for most setups.

> Would you like to keep buffers after replay?
If this is disabled, you get the buffer playback only once and then it is
deleted. If this is enabled, the buffer is not deleted. This may be useful if
you regularly use more than one client to connect to ZNC.

Using ZNC
---------

Once you have started ZNC you can connect with your favorite IRC-client to ZNC.
You should use username:password as the server password (e.g. /pass user:pass).

Once you are connected you can do /msg *status help for some commands.
Every module you have loaded (/msg *status listmods) additionally gets
 /msg *modulename help

File Locations
--------------

In its data dir (~/.znc is default) ZNC saves most of its data. The only
exception are modules, which are saved in <prefix>/libexec and the znc binary
itself. More modules (e.g. if you install some later) can be saved in
<data dir>/modules (-> ~/.znc/modules).

In the datadir are only two files:
 znc.pid - The pid of the currently running ZNC instance.
 znc.pem - This is the server certificate ZNC uses for listening and is created
           with znc --makepem.

These directories are also in there:
 configs - Contains znc.conf (ZNC's config file) and backups of older configs.
 modules - ZNC also looks in here for a module.
 moddata - Global modules save their settings here.
           (e.g. webadmin saves the current skin name in here)
 users - This is per-user data and mainly contains just a moddata directory.

ZNC's config file
-----------------

This file shouldn't be too hard too understand. An explanation of all the
items can be found here: http://en.znc.in/wiki/index.php/Configuration

Currently it is NOT possible to rehash the config file so you better use
webadmin or the admin module to change settings on-the-fly.

Writing own modules
-------------------

You can write your own modules in either C++ or perl.

C++ modules are compiled by either saving them in the modules source dir and
running make or with the znc-buildmod shell script.

For additional info look in the wiki:
http://en.znc.in/wiki/index.php/WritingModules
http://en.znc.in/wiki/index.php/ModuleHooks

Perl modules are loaded through the global module modperl.
See http://en.znc.in/wiki/index.php/Modperl

Further infos
-------------

Please visit http://znc.sf.net or #znc on EFNet if you still have questions.

You can get the latest development version with subversion:
 svn checkout https://znc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/znc/trunk znc
