juno

Yes.
It really is an IRC daemon.
It's written in Perl.

...

You can breathe again.
There. Very good.

Introduction

This is juno, a seriously modern IRC daemon written from scratch in Perl. Really.

Perl is the right language for IRC. IRC is chock full of various strings and other what not, all of which is easily parsed by Perl, where the C IRC daemons jump through all kinds of hoops and have really nasty looking code (have you ever looked at the Undernet IRC daemon?) Whereas this is, in my opinion, very clean.

This software will hopefully surprise you with its novel features and functionality. It's super easy to install and even comes with a working configuration, so go ahead and try it already.

Come chat with us at #k on irc.notroll.net too.

YES, this project is maintained!

As of Q4 2025, this project is being developed during my free time. I'm currently building out additional IRCv3 capabilities and working on InspIRCd linking. Since PyLink is no longer maintained, and juno has strong foundations for modules and hot reloading, I intend to expand its bridging capabilities. I am all ears for other feature requests.

Features

Here are some things that make juno stand out. You can

• Check out the latest code and hot reload your entire network with one IRC command, without restarting servers or dropping a single connection.
• Link a complex network of various IRCds and services packages spanning multiple server protocols.
• Configure servers en masse directly from IRC.
• Write modules for the easy-to-use event-based module API.

Plus, juno

• Is free and open-source with over 15 years of development.
• Is written in Perl, making it fun and easy to tinker with and extend.
• Is already way more feature-complete than you're likely expecting.
• Is extensively documented.
• Is excessively configurable, but also runs out-of-the-box.
• Consists entirely of modules that can be optionally loaded.
• Supports the latest IRCv3 standards.
• Supports multiple server protocols, including TS6 and JELP.
• Fully supports most IRC Services (Atheme, Anope, PyLink, etc.).

See Concepts for more on my goals for juno.

Setup and operation

Installation

Before installing juno, install the tools for a common building environment (a compiler, make, etc.) Below is an example on a Debian-based distribution. Also install a few Perl modules from the CPAN:

sudo apt-get install build-essential # or similar
cpanm --sudo IO::Async IO::Socket::IP Socket::GetAddrInfo JSON JSON::XS DBD::SQLite

Once you've installed the appropriate Perl packages, clone the repository:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/cooper/juno.git
# OR (whichever is available on your git)
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/cooper/juno.git

If your git does not support recursive cloning, or if you forgot to specify, run git submodule update --init to check out the submodules.

Next, pick a release. The default branch is master which is the development branch and might be broken at any given moment.

git checkout juno13-ava

Now set up SSL if you want or skip to the configuration.

SSL setup

If you wish to use SSL on the server, install libssl and the following Perl module:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
cpanm --sudo IO::Async::SSL

You will now need to run ./juno genssl to generate your self-signed SSL certificate.

In the configuration, use the sslport key in your listen block(s) to specify the port(s) on which to listen for secure connections. If you're setting up connect blocks with the ssl option enabled, you will also need to listen on more port(s) using the format: <protocol name>sslport; e.g. ts6sslport.

Configuration

juno comes with a working example configuration. So if you want to try it with next to no effort, just copy etc/ircd.conf.example to etc/ircd.conf. The password for the default oper account admin is k. You'll want to change that.

The config is for the most part self-explanatory, but the configuration spec has all the details.

Note that, because juno ships with a configuration suitable for fiddling, the default values in the limit block are rather low. A production IRC server may require higher limits on connection and client count, for example.

Operation

Most actions for managing the IRC server are committed with the juno script.

usage: ./juno [action]
    start       start juno IRCd
    forcestart  attempt to start juno under any circumstances
    stop        terminate juno IRCd
    debug       start in NOFORK mode with printed output
    forever     run continuously
    foreverd    run continuously in debug mode
    rehash      rehash the server configuration file
    mkpasswd    runs the password generator
    dev         various developer actions (./juno dev help)
    help        print this information

• start: Runs the server in the background as a daemon.

• forcestart: Runs the server in the background, ignoring the PID file if it appears to already be running.

• stop: Terminates the IRCd if it is currently running.

• debug: Runs the IRCd in the foreground, printing the logging output. Note, the log messages do NOT include raw messages as many IRC softwares do in debug mode.

• forever: Runs the IRCd continuously in the background. In other words, if it is stopped for any reason (such as a crash or exploit or SHUTDOWN), it will start again (with an incremental timeout if stopping repeatedly).

• foreverd: Runs the IRCd continuously in the foreground, printing the logging output.

• rehash: Notifies the currently-running server to reload its configuration file.

• mkpasswd: Runs the script for generating encrypted passwords for use in oper and connect blocks in the server configuration.

• dev: Includes a number of subcommand tools for developers; see ./juno dev help.

On Windows, start juno with juno-start.bat.

Upgrading

To upgrade an existing repository, run the following commands:

git pull origin master
git submodule update --init
git checkout <desired release tag>

OR (from IRC with the Git module loaded)

1. /UPDATE
2. /CHECKOUT <desired release tag>
3. /RELOAD

Information

Contact

Go to #k on irc.notroll.net.

File issues and feature requests here.

Author

Mitchell Cooper, aka cooper on irc.notroll.net #k

I've been working on this forever; see history

License

This is free software released under the ISC license.