irc-on-fly

Fly.io has a free tier for up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb and 3GB of persistant storage! Lets leverage that for an uncompromising IRC client setup.

This project gives you a weechat instance, sprinkled with relay config, and SSH daemon and Glowing Bear on top. It also comes with a maintenance free TLS setup, because fly.io's ingress layer «just works».

Screenshots

Desktop

Glowing Bear in the browser	WeeChat over SSH

Mobile

Glowing Bear	Weechat Android app	with notifications!

Setup

Create yourself a fly.io account.

Then pull the repo and;

# Install flyctl
curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh

# Add your public key so you can ssh to the box
mkdir keys
cp <your-pub-key> keys/id.pub

# Change the relay password
sed -i 's/ChangeThis/<new-password>/' config/relay.conf

# Add your own project name to it (becoms your hostname <name>.fly.dev`)
sed 's/irc-on-fly/<your-project-name>/' fly.toml

# Add a persistant volume, choose a nearby region
fly volumes create weechat --size 1

# Deploy!
fly deploy

Usage

Glowing Bear is a static HTML page with no backend, everything happens in your browser. Fill inn you hostname (<name>.fly.dev) and password and voila.

https://<name>.fly.dev/

or this

ssh -p 2222 irc-on-fly.fly.dev -t 'screen -rd'

or download the Weechat Android app.

Debugging

fly ssh console immediately gives you a root shell. Supervisord logs to files in /app/.

Tips and party tricks

Use tmux instead of screen (untested)

If tmux is your prefered choice; install it in the Dockerfile. and alter the command in supervisord.conf with

command=/usr/bin/tmux -L weechat new -d -s weechat weechat

Persist config

This setup hold WeeChat config files in the folder repo:config/weechat/ for ease of bootstrap and reproduceability. Because WeeChat really like to have all changes done via the command line here are a couple of steps for fetching your running config file down to your local repo.

In weechat

/autojoin --run to store the channels to join
/layout store to store the order of the channels
/save to save your settings to a disk

Get the files and have your repo be the source of truth on next deploy.

FILES="irc plugins relay weechat"
for file in $FILES; do scp -P 2222 -i <key> "weechat@<name>.fly.dev:.weechat/${file}.conf" config/weechat/; done

Add plugins

Add to Dockerfile, just besides the autojoin.py.

torvald/irc-on-fly