ircjournal

A lightweight, fast, standalone IRC log viewer for the web, with real-time log ingestion, written in Rust.

Screenshot of the web frontend. Nicks and some content have been changed.

Features

• Simple, no-dependency web front-end to browse and full-text search IRC logs.
  • Link to a specific line or block of lines.
  • Full-text server-side search inside a channel, local regexp search.
  • Optional live stream of IRC lines as they get ingested from log files.
  • Responsive layout for small screens.
• Standalone IRC ingestion binary that observes log files for updates.
  • Supported log formats: WeeChat. PRs welcome!

A non-goal of ircjournal is to include an IRC bot that would join channels. It relies on an existing client's log files.

Usage

tl;dr:

1. Create an empty PostgreSQL database.
2. Run ircj-watch close to where log files live.
3. Run ircj-serve close to your webserver.

                                           ╔═════════════════╗
         ┌─────────────┐                   ║ ┌─────────────┐ ║
User ◄───► Browser     │                   ║ │ IRC client  │ ║
         └──────▲──────┘                   ║ │ (log files) │ ║
                │                          ║ └──────┬──────┘ ║
       ╔════════╪════════╗                 ║        │        ║
       ║ ┌──────▼──────┐ ║                 ║ ┌──────▼──────┐ ║
       ║ │ Frontend    │ ║                 ║ │ Ingestor    │ ║
       ║ │ ircj-serve  │ ║                 ║ │ ircj-watch  │ ║
       ║ └──────▲──────┘ ║                 ║ └──────┬──────┘ ║
       ╚════════╪════════╝                 ╚════════╪════════╝
                │        ╔═════════════════╗        │
                │        ║ ┌─────────────┐ ║        │
                └────────╫─► PostgreSQL  ◄─╫────────┘
                         ║ └─────────────┘ ║
                         ╚═════════════════╝

Double-line boxes can be on the same machine or behind network boundaries, making for a pretty flexible setup.

PostgreSQL database

ircjournal relies on a PostgreSQL database for full-text search indexing and the notification mechanism (live updates). This is the only runtime dependency.

Please create an empty database and associated user. ircjournal will set up the rest on the first run.

ircj-watch

Run ircj-watch on the machine with the IRC log files. It will watch for changes and save new lines to the database. You can run irc-watcher on multiple machines. Each instance can ingest any number of log files.

You can configure the binary using either IRCJ_* environment variables or a file named ircj-watch.toml in $CWD.
Available knobs: irc-watch config.

The most important config knob is the list of log files to backfill and observe for changes, for example as env variable (the square brackets are significant):

IRCJ_PATHS=[/path/to/log, ...]

or with ircj-watch.toml:

paths = ["/path/to/log", ...]

ircj-serve

Run ircj-serve to expose the web interface, directly or behind a reverse-proxy server such as nginx.

You can configure the binary using either IRCJ_* environment variables or a file named ircj-serve.toml in $CWD.
Available knobs: irc-serve config , rocket config.

There are a few lines of embedded JavaScript to implement local search, "show join/part" filtering and live updates. The interface remains usable with JavaScript disabled.

Backfilling existing logs

The first time you run ircj-watch on an empty database, or whenever you add a new log file, or if new lines were added in a channel while ircj-watch was not running, the program will attempt to find the last recorded line in the file and backfill (save) the missing new lines in the database. It will then continue watching for new lines, as usual.

You can therefore safely restart the ircj-watch binary at any time, and it should pick up where it left off.

Logging level

ircjournal uses the popular env_logger crate. You can customize log levels at per-module granularity with the RUST_LOG environment variable. For instance, use RUST_LOG=warn,ircj_serve=info to warn by default, and have info-level logs for ircj-serve.

Acknowledgments

The amazing whitequark/irclogger project motivated me to develop a similar IRC log viewer to try my hands at Rust.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 only.