To make configuration easier there are two confgiuration files provided with CGI:IRC, cgiirc.config and cgiirc.config.full. cgiirc.config which is the default file only includes the bare mininum options that need to be changed to use CGI:IRC to connect to a specific set of channels and servers, if you want to change any more advanced options or you want to allow CGI:IRC to connect to a more unrestricted set of servers/channels, you need to rename cgiirc.config.full to cgiirc.config (overwrite the old cgiirc.config).

The configuration file should look familar if you are used to UNIX style configuration files, lines begining with # are treated as comments, other lines set options in the form of key = value. If the setting is a toggle setting, 0 is off and 1 is on.

This page has all the options for the configuration file in it - you won't need to change all of them, in fact to get it working you can easily edit your chosen configuration file and just change a few settings such as the server to connect to and locations of the images.

Default settings such as channels and servers

Option	Comment
default_server	Either a name of the default IRC server, or a comma seperated list of servers to use. (A comma seperated list will be displayed as a select box on the login form)
default_port	The default port on the IRC server to connect to, most IRC servers run on port 6667 so this setting doesn't need to be changed
default_channel	The channel to login to by default, as for server this can be a comma seperated list
default_name	The default IRC Name (realname) to use
default_nick	The default nickname, a ? will automatically be replaced with a random number to give a uniqueness to nicknames
default_user	The default username to send, will be used by the server if identd isn't running (this will be replaced with an encoded IP address if the encoded_ip option is set)

Locations and names of files

Option	Comment
script_nph, script_form, script_login	These set the default names for the scripts, they must be set but generally shouldn't need to be changed
image_path	This sets the location of the images, for clients, eg. if you copied the images to http://your.host/images/ and irc.cgi is installed at http://your.host/cgiirc/irc.cgi then /images is a suitable value. You can write the full url of the images directory here if needed

Option	Comment
quit_message	The quit message given to the user when they use /quit.
quit_prefix	The prefix added in front of the quit message made when the user quits without explictly quitting or an error occurs.
socket_prefix	Location added to the front of the directory where the socket files are stored. Usually fine left as the /tmp directory unless there are multiple installs of CGI:IRC on the same machine.
vhost	The IP address to bind to if not the default host on the system.
vhost6	Same as about but for IPv6.
prefer_v6	If a name lookup returns both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses this will prefer the IPv6 address rather than IPv4.

Option	Comment
login basic, login advanced	These control the options that are displayed on the login form produced by irc.cgi, they are a space seperated list of fields to be displayed on the login form (Possible values: Nickname, Realname, Channel, Server, Port, Password).
format	sets the format to use for output display
removecolor	Remove almost all colour from the output.
linkshorten	By default CGI:IRC shorterns the text inside links to 120 characters to work around browser bugs. This changes the length text is shortened to.

You can override the default settings for the interfaces in the config file, but a user can still use the options menu in CGI:IRC to change the option for themselves. Some of these options require the user to be using Mozilla or Internet Explorer. Toggle options can be enabled by setting them to 1.

Option	Comment
interface timestamp	Enables timestamps
interface smilies	Enables turning smilies into images
interface font	Sets the default to use (IE/Mozilla only)
interface shownick	Shows the user's nickname next to the text entry box at the bottom (IE/Mozilla only)

Option	Comment
encoded_ip	encoded_ip, set to 3 to send real IP in realname and the encoded ip in username, set to 2 to send hex encoded IP address in username and in the realname, set to 1 to send only in realname and 0 to disable. (set this to 1 on undernet servers).
ip_access_file	Sets the location of the ip_access_file, see ipaccess.example for details about how to set this up. Basically edit ipaccess.example to have a sensible setup then rename it to ipaccess and set this configuration option to that filename.
allow_non_default	When this is set rather than limiting the servers and channels that can be connected to to the ones set in defaults, access_server and access_channel will be checked.
access_channel	This is regular experssion that sets what channels access should be allowed to. eg: to allow access to #chat and #help (#chat|#help)
access_server	This is regular experssion that sets what servers access should be allowed to. For example to allow acccess to all servers in the blitzed.org domain: .*\.blitzed\.org
access_command	A list of commands to allow and deny access to, this is a space seperated list of commands to allow access to or if prefixed with an ! commands to disallow access to. Eg to only allow access to, msg, me, whois, join, nick this could be set to msg me whois join nick ! Note the ! on the end, it disallows all other commands than the ones specified.
session_timeout	If the user doesn't say anything for this number of seconds then they will be timed out. It's a good idea to set this to a high value incase a web-proxy keeps the connection open (but it doesn't interfere if the user wants to stay online).
server_password	If your server is password protected and you wish to provide the password in the script rather than get the user to enter the password then set this option to the password (The user can still override this with a password on the login form).