There is a commercial chat service that gives you historical search for all channels. IRC does not offer this by default. This is a little tool to help support that kind of functionality, using Solr.

Check out conf/application.conf. This should be fairly self documenting.

Each channel specified in the configuration can also get a specified purge time, where messages older than a particular time can be purged.

Additionally, some values can be specified via a system property:

• -Dsolr.home=/tmp/solr - A directory for solr to write data to, if using the embedded server
• -Dsolr.url=http://host:port - A URL to use for a remote solr instance

Just use the pre-built jar. Or, feel free to built with sbt.

run java -Dconfig.file=config.properties -jar lesshipchat.jar. Or run it via daemon so it goes into the background and leaves you alone.

Pretty basic API for providing JSON and JSONP output describing channels and message counts.

GET /api/groups

• callback - string, optional. for use with jsonp

There is a pretty basic search API that provides JSON and JSONP output.

GET /api/search

• callback - string, optional. for use with jsonp
• query - string, optional. defaults to *:*.
• size - int, optional. defaults to 10, max 500.
• page - int, optional. defaults to 0.
• sort - string, optional. defaults to desc. asc is also valid.

Queries are basically naked solr queries. The fields that can be searched on are:

• timestamp - time of message
• group - the irc channel the message was in
• message - the body of the message
• user_nick_meta_s - nickname of user

Valid queries include:

query=fizz # Searches all fields for fizz
query=message:fizz+AND+group:Channel # Returns messages from Channel matching fizz
query=user_nick_meta_s:bmatheny+AND+message:icinga # Matches nick and message

This is not fancy, just a quick and dirty hack.