IRCStream is a simple gateway to the MediaWiki recent changes feed, from the IRC protocol. It was written mainly for compatibility reasons, as there are a number of legacy clients in the wild relying on this interface.
It presents itself as an IRC server with a restricted command set. Sending messages to channels or other clients is not allowed. Each client is within a private namespace, unable to view messages and interact with other connected clients, create channels, or speak on them.
Other clients are not visible on channel lists, /who etc. The sole exception is a (fake) bot user, that emits the recent changes feed, and which is also embedded in the server (i.e. it's not a real client).
The software requires a configuration file, ircstream.conf. An example file is provided with this distribution and
should be self-explanatory.
The server has been designed to be as cloud-native as an IRC server can be. It exposes metrics over the
Prometheus protocol, logs to stdout, and can optionally log in JSON as well, using a
structured format to allow easy ingestion into modern log pipelines.
It currently requires messages to be broadcast over UDP to a specified port using the so-called RC2UDP protocol: each
UDP message is expected to be a channel name, followed by a tab character, followed by the message to be sent to all
clients.
The idea for this project was originally conceived in November 2016 internally at the Wikimedia Foundation, as a
response to ongoing difficulties with the deprecation of the irc.wikimedia.org gateway. It has been developed on and
off since then, saw its first release in May 2020, and it was finally deployed in production to replace the aging
irc.wikimedia.org infrastructure in October 2024.
Python 3.11+, plus the following modules from PyPI or your distribution:
prometheus_clientstructlog
You can use pip install . to install the package into the standard location of your system, which will install
an executable in a standard binary location, such as /usr/bin or /bin. Alternatively, provided the necessary libraries
above have already been installed, one can execute python3 -m ircstream to run directly from the cloned source tree.
Copyright © Faidon Liambotis
Copyright © Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
This software is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for the full license text.