Lurker is a self-hosted modern IRC client with a retro flair, most easily described as "your personal IRCCloud, with Weechat looks".

Lurker runs as an always-on server that stays connected to IRC on your behalf, keeps full message history, and lets you reattach from any browser — desktop or mobile — picking up exactly where you left off. Open it on as many devices and tabs as you like; read state, settings, and history stay in sync everywhere; when all clients are disconnected, auto-away sets your status, and web push notifications inform you of highlights. Oh, and the icon rules.

• Always-on and multi-user. Each invited user connects to their own set of IRC networks, and Lurker stays connected when they're away.
• Full history and search. Every message is stored and searchable. Auto-away triggers after your last client disconnects, and smart push notifications fire on highlights.
• IRC with Modern Convienences. Peer presence, automatic nick regain, join/part summarization, tab nickname completion, message drafts, saved messages, user notes, and a searchable channel browser w/ cache.
• Image uploads. Paste, drag, or pick an image; Lurker optimizes it, uploads it to x0.at or catbox.moe, inserts the link into your message, and keeps a history of all your uploads.
• Customizable UI. The beautiful retro terminal-style interface has 40+ settings to customize it how you want, and you can freely pin and rearrange channels and DMs.
• Installable. Lurker is a PWA — install it as a native-feeling app on your phone, Mac, or PC straight from the browser.

This fork extends upstream Lurker with split-window panes, Slack support, iMessage support, and a richer composer. The full, itemized list is in CHANGELOG.md; the highlights:

• Split-window panes (desktop). Open several buffers side by side in an auto-wrapping grid, with one shared input bound to the focused pane. Right-click a buffer and choose "Open in Split" to add a pane.
• Slack support. Slack is a first-class provider alongside IRC. A SlackConnection implements the same connection contract as the IRC adapter, so the server, history/read-state, and the entire Vue client drive it unchanged. It covers:
  • Connecting via an "Add to Slack" OAuth flow or by pasting bot/app tokens.
  • Channels, DMs, and group DMs as buffers, with history backfill, live messages, sending, typing indicators, and member lists.
  • Threads in a live side-pane, reactions (including click-to-toggle and an add-reaction picker), file and image attachments, message edits and deletes, presence, page-up history, mark-as-read sync, and whole-workspace search.
  • Slack markup and Block Kit rendering, app/bot real names, and workspace-custom emoji in both the message view and the composer.
  • A credential-free demo mode (sentinel demo tokens) that exercises the whole path without a real workspace.
• iMessage support. A third provider alongside IRC and Slack, via a self-hosted BlueBubbles server running on a Mac. The Lurker server talks to it over HTTP + Socket.IO; the client renders iMessage chats exactly like IRC and Slack. It covers 1:1 and group chats as buffers, history, live messages, sending, tapbacks as reaction chips, image and file attachments, and mark-as-read sync — plus a credential-free demo mode.
• Composer. ASCII emoticons (:), <3, :D, ...) auto-convert to emoji as you type, and the :shortcode: autocomplete now also surfaces a Slack workspace's custom emoji.
• Rich media (all providers). Links to Spotify, YouTube, news sites, etc. unfurl into preview cards (server-side, SSRF-guarded, fetched lazily as they scroll into view), and video attachments play inline.

Slack OAuth is configured through the SLACK_* environment variables documented in .env.example; without them, Slack networks are added by pasting tokens in the network form.

• <cfuser> amiantos: holy shit, you made something better than irccloud
• <amigojapan> great, now that amiantos's chat client is catching up to IRC cloud, I think I can switch to it as my daily driver
• <skdoo> amiantos makes cool shit
• <jadeia> lurker is really nice. this is streets ahead of irccloud in terms of design and ease of use.

• Server — TypeScript on Node (run via tsx), Express, irc-framework, ws, better-sqlite3, sharp, web-push, @slack/web-api, @slack/socket-mode, socket.io-client
• Client — TypeScript, Vue 3, Vite, Pinia, vue-router
• Tooling — Vitest, oxlint, oxfmt

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amiantos/lurker/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

Then open http://localhost:8015 and create your admin account. Username + password is the default; passkeys are optional. See SELF_HOSTING.md for the full guide — reverse proxy + HTTPS, enabling passkeys, push notifications, updating, and backups.

Don't want to run a server yourself? Lurker.Chat is official managed hosting: an always-on Lurker instance with backups, updates, and HTTPS handled for you — $5/mo, with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Stand up a public, HTTPS-enabled Lurker on a fresh droplet from a single pasted script — no SSH required, with passkeys, web push, and TLS all configured for you. Step-by-step instructions are in docs/digitalocean.md.

npm run install:all
npm run client:build
npm start

The server listens on port 8010 by default and stores everything in ./data/. Override with the envvars documented in .env.example.

npm run install:all
cp .env.example .env   # defaults assume the local hostname documented in the file
npm run dev

• Self-hosting guide — reverse proxy + HTTPS, passkeys, web push, updating, backups, and troubleshooting.
• Deploy on DigitalOcean — the one-shot droplet walkthrough.
• MCP & HTTP API — drive Lurker from agents, scripts, or other external tools.

• Chat in #lurker on Libera.Chat.
• Discuss Lurker and read my devlog over on The Eye of Providence.
• Say hi — I'm amiantos on Libera.Chat and MansionNET.

Mozilla Public License 2.0 — see LICENSE.