From ZNC to Soju

I have recently switched from ZNC to Soju as my IRC bouncer and I am already quite pleased with it. I usually run my bouncer on a Debian machine, where Soju is well packaged and runs smoothly right after installation. By contrast, the ZNC package included with Debian 13 (Trixie) and earlier fails to start after installation because of a missing configuration file. As a result, I was forced to maintain my own configuration file along with a necessary PEM bundle, copy them to the Debian system and carefully set the correct file permissions before I could run ZNC successfully. None of this is necessary with Soju, since installing it from the Debian package repository automatically sets up the configuration and certificate files. I no longer have to manage any configuration or certificate files myself.

Setup

It is quite straightforward to install and set up Soju on Debian. The following two commands install Soju:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install soju

Then setting up an IRC connection involves another two commands:

sudo sojuctl user create -username soju -password YOUR_SOJU_PASSWORD
sudo sojuctl user run soju network create -name bnc1 -addr irc.libera.chat -nick YOUR_NICK -pass YOUR_NICK_PASSWORD

Here, YOUR_SOJU_PASSWORD is a placeholder for a new password you must choose for your Soju user. Finally, we restart Soju as follows:

sudo systemctl restart soju

Database

What previously involved maintaining several files that had to be installed and configured on each machine running ZNC is now reduced to the two sojuctl commands above, which store my configuration in a SQLite database. Here is a glimpse of what the database looks like:

$ sudo sqlite3 /var/lib/soju/main.db '.tables'
Channel              MessageFTS_data      ReadReceipt
DeliveryReceipt      MessageFTS_docsize   User
Message              MessageFTS_idx       WebPushConfig
MessageFTS           MessageTarget        WebPushSubscription
MessageFTS_config    Network
$ sudo sqlite3 /var/lib/soju/main.db 'SELECT * from User'
1|soju|$2a$10$mM5Qcz8.OPMi9lyWDxPRh.bNxzq7jtLdxcoPl09AYTnqcmLmEqzSO|0|||2026-02-17T23:24:24.926Z|1||-1
$ sudo sqlite3 /var/lib/soju/main.db 'SELECT * from Network'
1|bnc1|1|irc.libera.chat|YOUR_NICK||||YOUR_NICK_PASSWORD|||||||1|1

Client Configuration

Finally, the IRC client can be configured to connect to port 6697 on the system running Soju. Here is an example of how this can be done in Irssi:

/network add -nick YOUR_NICK -user soju/bnc1 net1
/server add -tls -network bnc1 YOUR_SOJU_HOST 6697 YOUR_SOJU_PASSWORD
/connect net1

You can also set up multiple connections to IRC networks through the same Soju instance. All you need to do is repeat the sojuctl commands to create additional networks such as bnc2, bnc3 and so on, then repeat the configuration in your IRC client using new network names such as net2, net3, etc. These network names are entirely user defined, so you can choose any names you like. The names bnc2, net2 and so on are only examples.