ferrixd

Appearance

ferrixdThe Ferrous IRC Daemon

A from-scratch, memory-safe, IRCv3-complete IRC server in Rust — TLS-first, federated over mutual TLS, and load-tested to 100,000 concurrent connections on a single node.

Quick Start
Install
What is ferrixd?
ferrixd — Fe, element 26
🦀

Memory-safe to the wire

Zero unsafe code — forbidden at the workspace level. The zero-copy parser lives in its own audited, fuzzed crate and never panics on hostile input. No panic!/unwrap in the data path, enforced by CI.

🔐

TLS-first, hardened by default

TLS is the primary transport, with IRC-over-WebSockets (ws/wss) and WEBIRC gateways alongside it; plaintext must be explicitly enabled and is loopback-only unless you insist. SASL PLAIN, EXTERNAL, and SCRAM-SHA-256 over Argon2id-hashed accounts, verified in constant time.

📡

IRCv3-complete

29 capabilities including server-time, message-tags, batch, labeled-response, draft/chathistory, draft/multiline, and draft/metadata-2 — implemented against the spec text and covered by the integration suite.

🕸️

Federated, without the folklore

A modern S2S mesh — mutual-TLS certificate pinning, Lamport clocks instead of synchronized wall time, deterministic nick-collision resolution, and clean netsplit handling across multi-hop link trees.

🧱

History that survives restarts

Server-side chathistory with msgid continuity, backed by SQLite write-behind persistence. Channels can be registered; their topic, modes, and founder come back after a restart.

🧩

Sandboxed WASM plugins

Extend moderation with .wasm plugins run by a pure-Rust interpreter under a per-call fuel budget — a runaway plugin traps, it never wedges the server. No ambient authority.

🛡️

Built to be attacked

Bounded SendQ, token-bucket rate limits, per-IP throttling, ping timeouts, K/D/G-lines, HMAC host cloaking, and fail-closed configuration — a typo is an error, not a silent misconfiguration.

⚡

100k connections per node

~13.8 KB of memory per connection at 100,000 concurrent clients on an 8-core host — one async task per connection, a fixed worker-thread count, and sharded state instead of a global lock.

📦

One static binary

Prebuilt for Linux (static musl), macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Android/Termux, with a checksum-verifying one-line installer. Config generation, cert minting, and password hashing are built in.

irc.example.test:6697 — TLS 1.3SASL ✓
0k
concurrent connections
on one 8-core node
0.0
KB per connection
resident, at full load
0
IRCv3 capabilities
negotiable via CAP
0
lines of unsafe
forbidden workspace-wide

Thirty-five years old, and still the right shape ​

IRC is the simplest federated chat protocol that actually works: plain text over a socket, readable with openssl s_client, implementable in an afternoon. What it never had was a server built like it matters — memory-safe, spec-complete, hostile-input-proof, and honest about persistence.

ferrixd is that server. Element 26, oxidised into software.

sh
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/josunlp/ferrixd/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
ferrixd gen-config && ferrixd check && ferrixd

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.

ferrixd — the Ferrous IRC Daemon