Hosting IRC server on Mac

Question

Not having found any, I stumbled upon this post that explains how to install ngIRCd with homebrew and I decided to give it a try.

First off I ran the ruby script and successfully installed HomeBrew: it did however return an error about its sbin not being in my path. Therefore I ran homebrew doctor and it returned the following error:

Warning: Homebrew's sbin was not found in your path.
Consider amending your PATH variable so it contains:
  /usr/local/sbin

I found a post that suggested editing the /etc/paths file so that the /usr/local/bin line came before the /usr/bin line: I edited the file by SFTPing into my server and now its contents are:

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

However the error persisted. I found this other post and tried entering export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/sbin" in the terminal and tested the HomeBrew config again and this time it reported no errors.

Happy of the results I went on to install ngIRCd following the first post. I entered brew install ngircd and it did all of its magic without reporting any errors. I then went on with step two and pasted the vi ~/.bash_profile command in the terminal window but a series of lines with a $ sign at the beginning appeared and I couldn't get it to work. I closed the window, opened a new one, and typed in ngircd to start the server and it gave me a

bash: command not found

error.

However entering the export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/sbin" command once again in the new window followed by the ngircd command didn't return any errors. Therefore I went on and customized the ngIRCd config file in /usr/local/Cellar/ngircd/20.1/etc/ngircd.conf and tried logging into the server via Adium, only to get an Access denied: bad password error... I even restored the original .conf file to no avail. And of course there's the problem that I have to enter the export PATH command every single time I log into terminal. What am I doing wrong? I'd be happy to explore completely different solutions of course if there's some kind of guide i can follow!

I think this is how it went, but I might have missed or forgotten a few details. I hope this makes sense to someone among you out there xD

Answer 1

Ok so I finally found the solution. Apparently it was very simple and straightforward.

I gave the aforementioned post a second look and this answer proved to be the key. I looked up how to create a .bash_profile file and found this tutorial to be very helpful. After creating the file I pasted in the text from the answer linked above (export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/sbin") with no brackets or spaces before or after and saved the file. As indicated in the same answer I then ran source ~/.bash_profile in the terminal and I restarted just to be on the safe side. After reboot I ran brew doctor once again this time finding it to be working properly reporting no errors. I then uninstalled ngircd via homebrew and reinstalled it following the post linked above in my original question. I started up ngircd and the Access denied error was gone.

I hope this helps someone out there.

Thanks everybody anyway: I love the community and I look forward to be part of it in the future :)