Welcome to the IRC DevDocs!

Whether you’re new to IRC development or you’ve been around for decades, thanks for checking out this documentation. We’ll do our best to guide your through what we’ve made here, to other useful documents online, and through to building real software.

This Intro to IRC Development guide is presented in a few parts, which I’ll run through quickly:

  1. Introduction: This page right here, saying hello and introducing the docs.
  2. What is IRC? Going over what IRC is, comparing it to some other systems out there, and explaining how it works.
  3. Using IRC: Giving a very basic overview of how to get started using IRC properly. Clients, networks to connect to, etc.
  4. IRC Software: An introduction to the different types of IRC sofware out there, the differences between them, and where they sit protocol-wise.
  5. The IRC Protocol: An intro to the IRC protocol itself, how to read/understand it, and some useful examples.
  6. Bots: In-depth into writing an IRC bot!
  7. Clients: In-depth into writing a simple IRC client!
  8. Servers: In-depth into writing an IRC server!
  9. Bouncers: In-depth into how a bouncer works and how to write one.

While there has been an attempt to explain things in order, feel free to skip and jump around sections to find what interests you. Particularly if you’ve been doing this for a while already.

From myself (Daniel) and the whole IRC.com/ircdocs team, thanks very much for checking out our documentation. Best of luck on your IRC development journey, no matter how deep or shallow you dive into it.

See Also:

> This interesting function();
> This interesting function();