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Setting Up the IRC Bridge

Overview

The IRC bridge allows you to bridge IRC servers into your Element server.

To configure the irc bridge, beging by copying config-sample/ircbridge/bridge.yml to CONFIG_DIR/ircbridge/bridge.yml. Then edit the file and set the following settings:

  • key_file: passkey.pem To generate the passkey.pem file, please run the following in the CONFIG_DIR/ircbridge directory: openssl genpkey -out passkey.pem -outform PEM -algorithm RSA -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048
  • postgres_fqdn: ircbridge-postgres Use ircbridge-postgres if using postgres-create-in-cluster otherwise point this at your external database.
  • postgres_user: ircbridge Leave this if you are using postgres-create-in-cluster.
  • postgres_db: ircbridge Leave this if you are using postgres-create-in-cluster.
  • postgres_password: postgres_password Set this to either your password for the user connecting to an existing database, or if using postgres_create_in_cluster, set this to a new password with pwgen 32 1.
  • # postgres_create_in_cluster: true # uncomment if you want the installer to install postgresql for you. Not supported with the multi-node installer, where you must use an external postgres.
  • postgres_port Can be used to specify a non-standard port. 5432 is used if not specified. Optional
  • postgres_sslmode Can be used to specify the sslmode for the Postgres connection. Options are 'disable', 'no-verify' or 'verify-full'. 'disable' is used if not specified. Optional
  • Now specify a list of Matrix IDs that have admin access to the IRC bridge such as: 
    admins:
- "@adminuser:dev.local"
- "@adminuser2:dev2.local"
  • enable_presence: true This determines if presence is presented to IRC or not.
  • drop_matrix_messages_after_seconds: 0
  • bot_username: "ircbridgebot" The name of the bot.
  • enable_ident: false Whether or not to enable IRC ident.
  • ident_port_type: # HostPort or NodePort Required if enabling ident.
  • ident_port_number: 10230 Required if enabling ident.
  • logging_level: info Set the default logging level of the bridge.
  • enable_provisioning: true

Next, we have the provisioning rules section, which will make sure that rooms are not bridged if a match is made on these rules. This is useful for preventing bad actors on Matrix from flooding IRC. This section looks like:

provisioning_rules:
 # The bridge checks the joined members of a propective room and checks to see
 # if any users matching these regex sets are in the room. `exempt` users never
 # match, and will be ignored. If any user matches `conflict`, the room will not
 # be allowed to be bridged until the user is removed. Both sets take a regular expression.
 userIds:
   exempt:
     # These users never conflict, even if matching
     - "@doubleagent:badguys.com"
   conflict:
     # These users will deny a room from being bridged.
     - "@.*:badguys.com"
provisioning_room_limit: 50
  • rmau_limit: 100 Set this to the maximum number of remote monthly active users that you would like to allow in a bridged IRC room.
  • users_prefix: "irc_" Set a user prefix for irc users.
  • alias_prefix: "irc_" Set an alias prefix for irc users.
  • address: irc.someserver.net The adress of the irc server to bridge. Now for the above IRC server, we have a set of parameters that can be set:
  • name: "Server Name" The server name to show on the bridge. Now below that, you'll see the botConfig with these parameters:
  • enabled: true Leave this on.
  • nick: "MatrixBot" Nick of the bridge bot
  • username: "matrixbot" Username of the bridge bot.
  • password: "some_password" Password of the bridge bot. Generate this with pwgen 32 1

For other settings that can also be applied to this config file, please see:https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/blob/develop/config.sample.yaml#L52

Connecting to the Bridge

  1. From Element, send a DM to the bridge bot /msg @ircbridgebot:element.local where element.ocal is you servers domain name
  2. Send the bridge !whois to see if you can get logged in to the IRC network
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