If you’re here, I assume you want to setup an IRCForwarder. This is a little Java utility you can put on a server which will forward all messages to a web socket to a specified IRC Server, and vice versa. In order to do this, you’ll need a couple of things:

• A server to put the IRCForwarder on
• Java 8
• An SSL Certificate to secure the websocket (optional)

Unfortunately, the forwarder cannot connect to an irc server securely yet – this may come in a future update to the forwarder.

Using the forwarder is as follows:

1. Upload the jar to your server (get it at http://rymate.co.uk/dl/IRCForwarder.jar)
2. Run the jar file as follows – java -jar IRCForwarder.jar replacing the placeholders with the values you want
3. Connect using WinIRC to the IP of the ircforwarder server and the websocket port.

If you want to secure the websocket, use nginx or apache2 to proxypass requests from https to your websocket. The relevant part of the config for nginx is shown below:

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# pass all requests to the socket
location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8888;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; # allow websockets
    proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr; # preserve client IP
}

This config may need some editing to get it working with your setup. To ensure the connection is secure, the Mozilla ssl config generator is a good start