Upon http://irc.dabase.com/ I log the irc://irc.freenode.net/hackerspacesg IRC channel. I implemented this as minimal as possible! It’s not an archive, it’s just to see what’s the latest chitter chatter for a community sign board.

To do this you will need:

1. an always connected VPS with systemd (I use Archlinux upon an AWS EC2 micro instance)

• ii suckless IRC client since it’s filesystem-based!
• gotail to take the file and stream it to browser using SSE

systemd service files

ii

Which would live at /etc/systemd/system/ii.service

[Unit]
Description=IRC logger
# Start once network is up
After=network.target

[Service]
# NOTE CHANGE hendry to your $USER
User=hendry
ExecStart=/home/hendry/tmp/ii/ii -s irc.freenode.net -n iilogbot
# Join the channel
ExecStartPost=/bin/bash -c 'sleep 5 && echo "/join #hackerspacesg" > /home/hendry/irc/irc.freenode.net/in'
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

gotail

Which would live at /etc/systemd/system/gotail.service

Of course you would need to modify this for your IRC channel and $USER too.

[Unit]
Description=Log IRC to the browser
After=ii.service
Requires=ii.service

[Service]
ConditionPathExists=/home/hendry/irc/irc.freenode.net/#hackerspacesg/out
# This is important for it to find its template
WorkingDirectory=/home/hendry/tmp/gotail
ExecStart=/home/hendry/tmp/gotail/gotail /home/hendry/irc/irc.freenode.net/#hackerspacesg/out
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Edit & test them out (start and status systemctl cycles!) and once you are happy, the final test is to sudo systemctl enable ii gotail and reboot!