README.md

Internet Relay Chat

What is IRC?

Internet Relay Chat is a forum made for group discussions made and popular in pre-socical media era. IRC servers usually follow TCP protocols and a tree topology. In today's world this is a very obsolete technology but it helps to learn the basics of how messages are commuted between computers connected on a local area network.

Intended functionalities

• build a decentralised chatting platform using socket programming in C language
• implement commands, different chatrooms and channels in the IRC
• handle multiple clients using a tree topology

Environment Setup

For windows users

• setup Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to be able to use linux command line
  • wsl installation guide
• install gcc compiler since the prgram is written in c language
  • install gcc on windows

For MacOS and Linux

Environment setup is simple, you just need to setup gcc to compile c programs.

• for mac, install gcc using homebrew or any other package manager (preferably)
  • gcc installation guide for mac
• install linux bild essentials
  • installation guide

How to run the application

• open the directory where you've cloned the repo in your terminal or cli
• run the following commonds for both serverside and client side code
  • to compile and run on windows
    • gcc path/to/c/file.c -o path/to/output.exe
    • .path/to/output.exe portNumber (for severside files)
    • ./path/to/output.exe ipAddress portNumber (for clientside files)
  • to compile and run on MacOS or Linux
    • gcc path/to/c/file.c -o path/to/output
    • .path/to/output portNumber (for severside files)
    • ./path/to/output ipAddress portNumber (for clientside files)

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome!

See contributing.md for ways to get started.

Please adhere to this project's code of conduct.