irc-server's Introduction

Internet Relay Chat

What is IRC?

Internet Relay Chat is a forum made for group discussions made and popular in pre-socical media era. IRC servers usually follow TCP protocols and a tree topology. In today's world this is a very obsolete technology but it helps to learn the basics of how messages are commuted between computers connected on a local area network.

Intended functionalities

build a decentralised chatting platform using socket programming in C language
implement commands, different chatrooms and channels in the IRC
handle multiple clients using a tree topology

Environment Setup

For windows users

setup Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to be able to use linux command line
- wsl installation guide
install gcc compiler since the prgram is written in c language
- install gcc on windows

For MacOS and Linux

Environment setup is simple, you just need to setup gcc to compile c programs.

for mac, install gcc using homebrew or any other package manager (preferably)
- gcc installation guide for mac
install linux bild essentials
- installation guide

How to run the application

open the directory where you've cloned the repo in your terminal or cli
run the following commonds for both serverside and client side code
- to compile and run on windows
  - gcc path/to/c/file.c -o path/to/output.exe
  - .path/to/output.exe portNumber (for severside files)
  - ./path/to/output.exe ipAddress portNumber (for clientside files)
- to compile and run on MacOS or Linux
  - gcc path/to/c/file.c -o path/to/output
  - .path/to/output portNumber (for severside files)
  - ./path/to/output ipAddress portNumber (for clientside files)