how to irc over xmpp

chats within chats

2024-08-06

The intended audience of this article is my friend Will, or anybody else who is already familiar with IRC and XMPP, and wants to know how to connect to IRC over XMPP.

Preliminaries

Nonetheless, some preliminaries. In case you are not the intended audience. (I commend your curiosity!)

IRC is an internet chat protocol that has existed more or less since the beginning of the internet. To learn more about it, check out the following resources:

• https://libera.chat/guides/basics
• https://modern.ircdocs.horse/

A few irc servers to join and chat on are:

• https://tilde.chat/
• https://libera.chat/

XMPP is another, more different internet chat protocol that has existed not quite as long as IRC. It is quite a bit more complex than IRC. It is defined by over a dozen RFCs and has probably over a hundred expansion packages. But that’s all on the backend! In practice, xmpp is pretty straightforward and easy to use!

https://xmpp.org/getting-started/

Biboumi is a bridge that allows you to connect to IRC servers over XMPP.

https://doc.biboumi.louiz.org/

There are a couple of biboumi services that I know of:

• https://tilde.team/wiki/xmpp#biboumi
• https://hmm.st/#biboumi

Okay that’s enough of the preliminaries.

Profanity

Once you have a xmpp account and a client, you’ll want to start ircxmmp-ing!

In order to do this, you will need to use a client that can configure ad-hoc commands.

I had never heard of ad-hoc commands before. And the only client I found that allowed configuration of them is Profanity.

https://profanity-im.github.io/index.html

Profanity is a text-based xmpp client. It’s written in c and uses ncurses, and claims to be the Irssi of xmpp clients. (Irssi is a venerable IRC client.)

Also, Profanity is already installed on the pubnix server where I hang out. Convenient!

Ad-Hoc Commands

Okay, fire up your Profanity. Check out /help and /help account and then log into to your xmpp server.

Now, you need to build the id of the server you want to connect to. It will look like <irc-server>@<biboumi-server>. e.g. irc.libera.chat@biboumi.sports.horse. Open up a chat window in Profanity with /msg irc.libera.chat@biboumi.sports.horse.

Now you’re ready to execute some ad-hoc commands and configure some options! In the chat window, type /help cmd. And then /cmd list. And then /cmd exec configure.

This will drop you into the config editor, which is a “form.” Read /form help. And look at /form help field1 etc. And notice that to set a field, you just do e.g. /field1 <value>.

The fields are also described in the biboumi docs.

https://doc.biboumi.louiz.org/9.0/user.html#id2

Tragedy

The real tragic part about this post is that I did this configuration once a really long time ago and never had to revisit those settings ever again. So I do not remember which fields to set, nor what to set them to. You’re on your own for this part, I fear. You’re smart, and you have the tools you need to be successful. You got this.

Finally

Once the server is configured, you can now join a channel on that irc server on the xmpp client of your choice by joining a MUC with the JID #<irc-channel>%<irc-server>@<biboumi-server>.

That’s it. That’s all I got. So long and see you in the funny papers.