Installation

There are several possibilities to install ZNC on your machine. The latest version is always available using the source tarball from https://znc.in/releases.

A ChangeLog is available in the wiki. You can also read more about ZNC's portability.

Which way should I choose for installing ZNC?

If you don't have root access, the only way is to use source tarball. You'll need to use cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$HOME/.local" as described.

If you have root access, you can use either source tarball or the convenient way for your distro. Check section about your distro for details, but be aware that these may contain old versions of ZNC!

Once you have installed ZNC, you can create a config file with znc --makeconf.

Development Versions

Read the git page if you want to get the current development version. Beware that this might have more bugs, more features, be a little unstable and eat your first born. You have been warned!

Source Tarball

Official source tarballs can be found here.

If you want to compile ZNC with OpenSSL support, you need the OpenSSL development package. On Debian/Ubuntu this is called libssl-dev, on CentOS/Fedora/Red Hat it's openssl-devel, and on openSUSE it's libopenssl-devel. A good way to install this and other dependencies is the build dependency feature of package managers (apt-get build-dep / yum-builddep / zypper source-install --build-deps-only).

1. Download the latest source tarball
2. tar -xzvf znc-1.9.1.tar.gz
3. cd znc-1.9.1
4. mkdir build
5. cd build
6. cmake ..
   (use cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$HOME/.local" if you don't want a system wide installation or simply don't have root access; use cmake -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/path/to/openssl if you have a non-standard SSL path)
   (use ccmake or cmake-gui to see other configure options)
7. make
   (if you are on a dedicated server and your CPU has more than one core, you can use make -jX where X is the number of CPU cores to speed up compilation)
8. make install

Please note that compiling can take 5-10 minutes or more.

Once you have installed znc, you can use znc --makeconf to make a configuration file for ZNC. This config is stored in ~/.znc under the user you run it as. You should create a dedicated non root user to run znc under.

ZNC is run by just executing znc under the dedicated znc user, at which stage it goes to background. It does not automatically make an init.d service for itself (which can be done by following the instructions to running ZNC as a system daemon) nor does it need to be run in screen or something similar.

See the FAQ page if you encounter problems.

Linux

Docker

ZNC is available as an image in Docker Hub, and can be downloaded with:

docker pull znc

Follow the link above for additional instructions.

If you want to test great new features (and bugs!), unstable ZNC image is here.

Debian

Debian provides ZNC packages which may be installed using (stretch/stable, buster/testing, sid)

apt install znc

Debian Jessie LTS backports

apt -t jessie-backports install znc

If you want to build znc from source to get a newer version than Debian provides, you may need the following packages:

build-essential
libssl-dev
libperl-dev
pkg-config
libicu-dev

You can use the command

aptitude build-dep znc

to install build dependencies automatically. Note that sometimes these build-depedencies are outdated and won't work with the current version of ZNC.

Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Fedora has znc packaged in it's main repository and their Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository provides them for CentOS/RHEL.

If using RHEL install the EPEL repository by downloading the appropriate package linked on EPEL's website.

Once you have EPEL installed (or are on Fedora), execute:

sudo yum install znc

or dnf

sudo dnf install znc

Once installed you can configure znc by running:

sudo -u znc znc --makeconf # this creates /var/lib/znc/.znc

Then finally to start it you can run:

sudo systemctl start znc # or enable if you want it to autostart

Build from Source: CentOS 7+ only

If you really wish to build from source, then please follow the instructions here, written by Thomas Ward. Note that these instructions do utilize the EPEL repository in order to get all the necessary build dependencies (and there's a lot of them). These instructions work properly to create a basic ZNC installation. CentOS 7 or newer is needed because of the C++ standards being used, and older CentOS not having the required compilers for those standards.

Ubuntu

This page lists all of the ZNC packages in the Ubuntu repositories.

You can either build ZNC from source, or use a PPA that was made by a community member to contain pre-built ZNC packages for all supported Ubuntu releases. Note that the PPA does not contain packages for every Ubuntu release, and the support dates for various Ubuntu versions is detailed here. If the release of Ubuntu you are on is not supported on the PPA, you will have to compile it from source yourself.

Build From Source

If you want to build znc from source to get a newer version than Ubuntu provides, you may need to determine capability of your system to build ZNC 1.6.0 (and newer) based on the version of Ubuntu.

Building from Git Master

If you are trying to use the Git master version of the source code, then you will also need to ensure the following packages are also installed. You will not need to install these if you are using a stable release tarball, only if you are using Git master:

aclocal
pkg-config
automake
autoconf

After you have installed these packages, then continue onward for the additional dependencies you will need.

After installing dependencies, you will have to run autogen.sh to generate the configure script.

Add Build Dependency Sources

Ubuntu 14.04

If you are on Ubuntu 14.04, you will need to add one PPA to your system, with the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:teward/swig3.0

Newer than Ubuntu 14.04

You will not need any additional PPAs or sources for build dependencies.

Other Build Dependencies

After verifying you have the required build dependency sources, you will need to install the following packages:

build-essential
libssl-dev
libperl-dev
pkg-config
swig3.0
libicu-dev

After you have done this, you can follow the instructions on this page for compiling from the source tarball.

(open)SUSE

ZNC is part of the official repositories. To install, use the YaST GUI or install via commandline by typing

zypper install znc

Gentoo

Gentoo provides ZNC packages which may be installed using:

emerge -av net-irc/znc

Several USE Flags can be used for znc:

• argon2: store password hashes using Argon2id instead of SHA-256
• icu: character encodings support
• perl: adds support for writing perl modules
• python: adds support for writing python 3 modules
  • python_single_target_python3_NN: use the specific python version
• ssl: enable secure socket layer connections
• sasl: build cyrusauth module
• tcl: adds support for writing tcl modules
• zlib: compression for HTML in web UI

equery uses znc -a

Will print you a list of USE flags that will be used for znc

Slackware

Latest Slackware SBo Slackbuild

Alpine Linux

To install znc from the package manager, enter the following command:

sudo apk add znc znc-extra znc-modperl znc-modpython znc-modtcl ca-certificates

If you want to build znc from source to get a newer version than Alpine provides, you need to install packages with the following command:

sudo apk add autoconf automake gettext-dev g++ make openssl-dev pkgconfig zlib-dev 

If you want to run git, Debugging, perl, (requires swig), python, (requires swig), tcl, or cyrus then install the packages that correspond:

sudo apk add git gdb perl-dev python3-dev swig tcl-dev cyrus-sasl-dev

Archlinux

ZNC is part of the archlinux package repository, and can be installed with the following:

pacman -S znc

Additionally you can install the following optional dependencies to add support for additional modules.

• cyrus-sasl - saslauth module
• perl - modperl module
• python - modpython module
• tcl - modtcl module

Unstable/Testing

You can install the latest git snapshot from the Arch User Repository.

FreeBSD

ZNC is in FreeBSD ports, just do:

cd /usr/ports/irc/znc
make config
make install clean

or pkg_add

pkg_add -r znc

or pkgng

pkg install znc

Mac OS X

There are two ways to install ZNC on OS X, either using a package manager such as Homebrew or installing it yourself from source. See this blog post for a tutorial on how to compile ZNC from source.

• NOTE: If you are running on PPC architecture and cannot make the ./configure && make && sudo make install dance work, you'll want to do the following:

1. Make sure that you're using the --disable-perl switch for configure. Hence: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-perl

Homebrew

Installing Homebrew

For more information about Homebrew see here. The following command will install Homebrew to /usr/local

 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Homebrew requires Xcode and Mac OS X >= 10.5

Installing znc with Homebrew

 brew install znc

Installing znc with MacPorts

 port install znc

Microsoft Windows

Warning: If you're going to install ZNC on your local Windows machine, it will probably be useless. You should run it on some machine (Windows or not) that is connected to internet and runs 24/7.

Cygwin

ZNC is available in list of cygwin packages.

Download Cygwin, install it. When choosing list of packages to install, search for "znc".

ZNC is run by just executing znc, at which stage it goes to background. It does not automatically make a service by itself (which can be done by following the instructions in running ZNC as a system daemon#Windows) nor does it need to be run in screen or something similar.

Building from source on Cygwin

If you don't want to use the provided packages, you can compile ZNC from source; for that you'll need the dependencies installed, which you can see in BUILD_REQUIRES in znc.cygport which is used to build the cygwin ZNC package. After installing these packages proceed to source tarball section (or git)

MSYS2

ZNC is available in the msys pacman repository provided by MSYS2

Download MSYS2 and install it. Open any of the msys2 shells from the start menu and run pacman -S znc to install the package.

Once done you can launch znc from either the MSYS2 shells or Windows Command Prompt provided you either added it to PATH or navigated to the directory where znc.exe is located.

Note: that due to bugs ZNC may not be able to fork into the background so you'll have to start it with znc -f (foreground)

WSL

After ensuring that WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) itself works, follow the Linux instructions above.

However note that it is not suitable for services unless you enable a currently experimental option/setting which you can then follow the Running ZNC as a system daemon#Linux instructions