IRC with irssi

From my beginnings in the Free Software and GNU/Linux, one of the features that caught my attention is the power of the command line in this operating system. From moving between different directories or installing an operating system completely from scratch, these are some of the routine tasks you can achive from the terminal.

In this post I will show how to configure irssi to automate some of the steps to carry out in order to access a chat room, as it is connecting to the server, authenticate and then joining the differents channels that are of interest.

Installing irssi

To install irssi in fedora, just open a terminal and type the following command:

su -c 'dnf install irssi'

And to install irssi in debian:

su -c 'apt-get install irssi'

Running irssi

To run irssi, open a terminal and type the following command:

irssi

Configurations

Server Configurations

All these commands must be executed on a irssi session.

First we will remove the existing server configuration that we want to automate. With /server list we can view existing servers:

/server list

In our case we will remove the existing configuration of Freenode.

/server remove chat.freenode.net

And add the new configuration with the following command:

/SERVER ADD -auto -network Freenode chat.freenode.net 6667 your_nick_password

In which -auto defines the connection to the Freenode server as automatic and your_nick_password is your user password.

Adding Channels

Similarly, it is possible to add channels to this server in order to get connected automatically on each login, for this run the following command in our irssi session:

/channel add -auto #fedora Freenode

In which -auto allows us joining to #fedora channel at Freenode server automatically at each login.

Finally, every time we make a change in our configuration, we must save changes with the command:

/save

irssi takes the user name of your current session on the system as the user for your session in irc, to prevent this from happening if the name of your session in the system does not match your user at Freenode, you should run irssi with the following parameter:

irssi -n nick

Where nick is your user nick on Freenode IRC.

Once you've added all your channels of interest from the Freenode server and saved the changes, you only need to run in a terminal the irssi command and automatically you will be connected to the server and all the channels you've added without needing to authenticate manually and without risking anyone from reading your password while you type it. All this from a terminal.

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