Switching from ZNC to TheLounge

I’m still using IRC (yes, I’m the one) and previously I installed Hexchat on all my machines and ZNC on my server to connect to my favorite networks and channels. But it’s not always possible to install an application nor run the portable app from my USB stick. I didn’t want to use a hosted service like irccloud neither, so I set out to find an alternative.

Luckily a user on mastodon called muesli pointed me to the project thelounge, which aims to provide an self-hostable application similar to irccloud.

Here’s a simple docker-compose.yml to start the application up:

version: '3'
services:
  thelounge:
    image: thelounge/thelounge:latest
    ports:
      - "9000:9000"
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - thelounge:/var/opt/thelounge
  # bind lounge config from a volume, not from the host file system
  volumes:
    thelounge:

Personally I don’t use the exposed port, because I run everything behind a reverse proxy on my installation, but if you run this locally, you can now access thelounge at http://localhost:9000.

If you want to modify the configuration, you have to do so inside the volume thelounge. I’m running temporary containers to edit them:

docker run --rm -it -v YOURPREFIX_thelounge:/data -w /data alpine vi /data/config.js

Replace YOURPREFIX which whatever your local directory name is. If you are not sure, you can list all docker volumes and search for the right one:

docker volume ls | grep thelounge

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