Installing ZNC on FreeBSD

If you chat in IRC more or less frequently, you definitely should use IRC bouncer. ZNC is one of the most advanced and popular. And as there could not be too many manuals in the internet — in this post I want to store the report of the installation (though, it is quite simple). In the text below ZNC is ZNC 1.2 and OS is FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-p1.

Install ZNC on FreeBSD

I prefer to install everything than can be installed in native to OS way, in native to OS way.

If you want to build the ZNC yourself you can find sources at ZNC site

Install it like any other program

cd /usr/ports/irc/znc
make install clean

or if you use portmaster, then just type:

portmaster -d irc/znc

Configure the system

Add this line to your /etc/rc.conf to autostart znc.

znc_enable="YES"
# to change default config dir and user add also next lines
# znc_conf_dir="/usr/local/etc/znc"
# znc_user="znc"

Create user for ZNC with nologin shell and nonexistent directory:

pw adduser znc -d /nonexistent -s /usr/sbin/nologin -c "ZNC user"

Create directory for config (if you changed the path in rc.conf, don’t forget to change it here)

mkdir /usr/local/etc/znc
chown znc /usr/local/etc/znc

Creating config for ZNC

The most important step left is to create the config file for your ZNC. It is better to start with interactive config generator.

su -m znc -c "znc --makeconf --datadir=/usr/local/etc/znc"

When asked, better enable the webadmin module, that will simplify the configuration later.

Start ZNC

service znc start
# or
/usr/local/etc.rc/znc start

If you enable webadmin module, you can acess it on the http(s):://server_ip:port. The port is the same you selected for IRC connections to listen on.

If something is not working

• If you enable SSL, you should enable it on client also and access webadmin via https.
• Don’ forget to open the port in the firewall.
• If server is running, but users can’t connect, try to enable adminlog module, it will log attempts to login. It log file is empty, maybe recheck the firewall?