tkellem

tkellem is an IRC bouncer, a proxy that keeps you permanently logged on to an IRC server and stores all messages so that when your client next connects, you can see the backlog of what happened while you were gone.

tkellem supports multiple users, multiple device-independent backlogs per-user, and connecting to multiple IRC servers all from the same process.

I am no longer actively developing Tkellem, since I'm no longer on IRC day-to-day. My company switched to another chat protocol. Maintainers are welcome.

This will have to do as a quickstart guide, for now:

$ gem install tkellem
$ tkellem start
$ tkellem admin
> help
> listen ircs://0.0.0.0:8765
> user <my-name> --role=admin
> password --user=<my-name> <my-new-password>
> network --public --name=freenode ircs://irc.freenode.org:7000

Then connect to tkellem with an irc client:

server: localhost
port: 8765
ssl: yes

nickname: <my-name>
login: <my-name>@freenode
server password: <my-new-password>

Note that all config and log files are stored in ~/.tkellem of the user you run tkellem start as. You also need to run tkellem admin as this same user, in order to have access to the admin console.

Each user can connect with multiple devices. Devices are specified in your login by appending :<device-name> to your login. Example:

login: <my-name>@freenode:work-machine

If there is no :<device-name> appended to your login, tkellem just uses a default device.

Using multiple devices simply marks separate points in the backlog so you get only the relevant backlog on a per-device basis.

Upgrading is as simple as:

$ gem install tkellem
$ tkellem restart

All active clients will be forced to re-connect. Their positions in the backlog will not be lost, so restarting is relatively painless.