How to install irssi on Dreamhost

This was a useful guide I wrote back on my old website. I was trying to install irssi, and I couldn't remember how I installed it last time. Luckily it was available on archive.org's WayBackMachine. I have updated this guide to glib-2.19.8 and irssi-0.8.14.

To install irssi, you can eigher follow the next 7 steps and install from source. Or you could download the binary I compiled here.

Every command on this page should be entered into a SSH Prompt on DreamHost

SSH into your Dreamhost server (for me, this is titan.dreamhost.com, you can find your server inside panel)

Create the necessary directories:

mkdir -p bin lib tmp
chmod 700 bin lib tmp

Adding lines to your ~/.bash_profile

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/lib/pkgconfig" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

Activate the new changes

source ~/.bash_profile

Download, untar, and install glib

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib/2.19/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
tar -xvzf glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
cd glib-2.19.8
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Download and install irssi

cd ~/tmp
wget http://irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.14.tar.gz
tar -xvvzf irssi-0.8.14.tar.gz
cd irssi-0.8.14
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Clean up

rm -rf ~/tmp/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz ~/tmp/glib-2.19.8 ~/tmp/irssi-0.8.14.tar.gz ~/tmp/irssi-0.8.14

Once you have installed it, simply type irssi to run it.

I asked Dreamhost if they would allow the use of a terminal application running all the time. Here is their response:

You won’t be in “trouble” for running an irc program (no servers) on our servers. However if the system becomes unstable, it would likely be one of the first processes killed by our admins as our servers are meant for hosting web pages only. In general , we just don’t want users running bots or their own server daemons on our servers.”

Posted on: 2009 Feb 24

Comments

Adam

Hi, well done, thanks, but how can i run perl script's ? I always get a " Irssi: Unknown command: SCRIPT "

Thanks for the help.

Jon Homan http://jonhoman.com/

Thanks for this info. I went through the tutorial last night and it works nicely.

Kyle Fuller http://kylefuller.co.uk/

@Adam: This guide is not on how to install irssi with perl scripting, I had a quick look. But I have no idea how to get it to work.

Aaron Fay

Brilliant :) Totally brilliant...

Kai http://roguepolitical.net/

I'm not exactly sure about everythign that all this did but it works, and works on irssi 0.8.14 too.

Jeremy Kitchen http://www.dreamhost.com/

nooo! never ever ever chmod 777 anything in your homedir. Whatever process you’re running will run as you and therefore only needs write permission as your user. chmod 777′ing a directory creates a fairly large security hole because anyone else on the system can write to it for any reason whatsoever.

Don’t do it, it’s a bad idea.

Kyle Fuller http://kylefuller.co.uk/

@Jeremy Kitchen, thanks for making me aware that this guide makes certain folders accessible by everyone. I have updated the guide, anyone who has run it previously can just run chmod -R 700 ~/bin ~/lib ~/tmp and the permissions will be changed.

Mr Potato Head http://www.reoo.com/

Kyle, thanks for posting this....works a treat!

M

Hey, have any of you got perl support working? When running ./configure I get "Building with Perl support ....... : NO!", "/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lperl" etc. Irssi without the scripts is a bit lame. Thinking about compiling perl on my account to get it working.

Your pre-compiled binary gives me "rssi: error while loading shared libraries: libgmodule-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".

Pezmc

Would someone mind looking at how to get it working with Perl Scripting.... I have tried but really can't get it to work!

grs

Apparently DreamHost doesn't have a /usr/lib/libperl.so link pointing to /usr/lib/libperl.so.5.8.8. The line in the configure script "PERL_LDFLAGS=$perlpath -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts 2>/dev/null is where the the perl link options are set. I took the string that generated and substituted it in the configure script, replacing '/usr/lib/libperl.so.5.8.8 for -lperl. I already had local perl libraries, so I set the --with-perl-lib configure setting to those libraries: ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-perl-lib=$HOME/perl5

Kyle Fuller http://kylefuller.co.uk/

I have updated the guide to the latest irssi (0.8.14), also uploaded the latest binary.

@M, This new binary should work.

@Pezmc, from what I understand. Irssi request the debian package libperl-dev which is not installed at dreamhost. If you could install libperl onto your user account then you should be able to install irssi with perl support. I think grs has managed to get it to work, could try what he said.

ryan http://rfost.com/

as of today, 3/4/2010, my ability to run screen stopped working. I usually run irssi inside of screen. screen I find very handy in many situations, I used a similar method to install my own build of screen within a localized environment. just a tip if anyone runs into the same problem...