webircproxy

webircproxy

webircproxy is a reverse proxy that accepts IRCv3-over-WebSocket connections, then forwards them to a conventional ircd that speaks the normal IRC client-to-server protocol.

This is similar to webircgateway, with the following differences:

1. webircproxy implements the official IRCv3 WebSocket specification
2. For clients using text (i.e., UTF-8) frames, webircproxy implements transcoding from other encodings to UTF-8
3. Consequently, the ENCODING command from webircgateway is not implemented. Clients seeking full control over character encodings should negotiate binary frames.
4. Only WebSockets are supported, not SockJS or other legacy transports
5. A number of webircgateway features (reCAPTCHA, ACME, ident, and DNSBLs) are not supported

webircproxy can run behind another reverse proxy, such as nginx; see the Ergo testnet configs for an example of the relevant nginx configuration. It can also run behind a load balancer that sends the PROXY v1 or v2 header. It will pass the best available client IP address (read either from the X-Forwarded-For header, the PROXY protocol header, or the client's apparent originating IP address) to the upstream ircd, using the WEBIRC command.

Quick start

To build webircproxy, install an up-to-date distribution of the Go language for your OS and architecture. Then type make; this should build a binary named webircproxy located at the root of the project.

To run webircproxy, provide it with a single command-line argument, the path to its config file. An example config file is provided as default.yaml. (Most of webircproxy's functionality is documented as comments in the example config file.)

Transcoding

webircproxy is also intended to serve as a proof-of-concept for server-side transcoding as a transition mechanism for the UTF8ONLY IRCv3 specification. Here are some benchmarks for transcoding individual IRC messages:

cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2130 CPU @ 3.40GHz
BenchmarkTranscodeWithFixedEncoding-4                  	  272278	      4054 ns/op	    2640 B/op	      14 allocs/op
BenchmarkTranscodeWithFixedEncoding2-4                 	  275428	      4420 ns/op	    1744 B/op	      11 allocs/op
BenchmarkTranscodeWithChardet-4                        	    7078	    161428 ns/op	   18384 B/op	      61 allocs/op
BenchmarkTranscodeWithChardet2-4                       	   10000	    119597 ns/op	   17462 B/op	      59 allocs/op
BenchmarkTranscodeWithUnicodeReplacementCharacter-4    	  223276	      6310 ns/op	    1072 B/op	       4 allocs/op
BenchmarkTranscodeWithUnicodeReplacementCharacter2-4   	  329599	      3787 ns/op	    1072 B/op	       4 allocs/op
BenchmarkUTF8Validate-4                                	 2757282	       436.5 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op

To rerun these benchmarks on your own hardware: make bench.