It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been on IRC for at least 30 years, and possibly much longer. I first discovered IRC by way of a BBS and have been hooked ever since. Most of that time has been by way of clients in a shell but occasionally I enjoyed a GUI client, especially in recent years.

About a decade ago, I moved from irssi to weechat because of its relay feature. The ability to have a persistent connection without a bouncer was appealing. I also wanted to be able to connect from my phone. Last year some time, I had trouble with SSL and weechat and decided to try quassel again. I had used it briefly ages ago and didn’t hate it so it seemed like a fun project to tinker with. This post is starting to sound like one of those SEO-bait recipe sites, so rather than talk about my grandmother’s made from scratch baked with love IRC clients, here’s how I got quassel-core up and running:

I have a sort of miscellaneous services VM on my Proxmox server. It has several containers running under podman as well as some random scripts and applications. One day I should try to use Nomad in its place but for now it quite slapdash and seemed like the perfect place to plop quassel-core.

It’s running Fedora Server 41, so I installed quassel-core using the package manager:

1sudo dnf install quassel-core

From there, I set up the quassel config directory and created an SSL cert as the documentation recommends:

1mkdir -p ~/.config/quassel-irc.org
2
3openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout ~/.config/quassel-irc.org/quasselCert.pem -out ~/.config/quassel-irc.org/quasselCert.pem

Now running quassel-core should start the server and prep it for the first time configuration. Install the quassel client from flathub (or your favorite package manager), start it, and connect to your server. You should be presented with the first time configuration screen where you can create a user, set the database, and handle other early tasks.

If you want IRC on the go and you’re running Android, you can use the Android client available in F-Droid. I do not believe you can set up the server with this client but it’s handy to have when you’re not near a computer.

For my own setup, I should probably install Quassel as a service (and automate all of this with Ansible) because all of my VMs reboot for backups and imaging automatically on Sunday nights. I am just running quassel-core in a byobu session so it’ll likely drop then. I’ll add more details once I figure that part out.