To install CGI:IRC you will need a web-hosting provider that supports CGI with Perl 5, runs some flavour of UNIX (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, etc) and most importantly allows you to connect to IRC in its acceptable use policy. Of course if it's your own system then you shouldn't have any problems with this. Before you start make sure you know where to upload files to use as cgi-bin, you will need to know this.

1. Download the archive containing CGI:IRC and extract it
2. Edit the configuration file to your needs
3. Upload the files to your web hosting server

To start with download the archive of the latest version of CGI:IRC, if you are downloading on windows you will generally do better with the .zip file. Extract it to a convient place as you will need to edit the config file before you upload it

Editing the configuration file has a whole section of it's own, so go and read it. (You might need to read the bit about where images should be uploaded below).
You might also need to edit the path to the perl binary in the nph-irc.cgi, client-perl.cgi and irc.cgi files, if you're unsure see your provider's information on CGI scripts (#!/usr/bin/perl, which is the default should be the location of the perl binary for almost all providers).

Where you decide to upload files depends on the set-up of your website. If your site allows CGI to be run from any directory then you can upload the images and cgi-bin files into the same place. If your site has a dedicated cgi-bin directory then you will need to upload the images to a seperate place and set image_path in the configuration file appropriately.

The contents of the directory you extracted are the cgi-bin files, except for the directories images and docs. If you upload via FTP you need to upload the cgi-bin files in ASCII mode (sometimes called text mode) into your cgi-bin directory and make sure that all the .cgi files are set to mode 755 (-rwxr-xr-x). Images need to be uploaded in binary mode to the location you set in the configuration file.

Uploading over SSH is similar, you can use a program such as WinSCP on windows, or scp directly on UNIX, one thing to watch out for is you have got the files in UNIX format once they are uploaded and don't forget to chmod the files if needed.

Once installed you should be able to visit the location you installed irc.cgi to with your web browser and get the login screen. If it doesn't work or some other problem occurs, see the troubleshooting section. If you have shell access to your system and you want to use the C client.cgi or the identd to give users a unique ident see the advanced section.