The Lounge

What is it?

The Lounge is a web IRC client that you host on your own server.

This is the official, community-managed fork of @erming's great initiative, the Shout project.

What features does it have?

• Multiple user support
• Stays connected even when you close the browser
• Connect from multiple devices at once
• Responsive layout — works well on your smartphone
• .. and more!

Why the fork?

We felt that the original Shout project "stagnated" a little because its original author wanted it to remain his pet project (which is a perfectly fine thing!).

A bunch of people, excited about doing things a bit differently than the upstream project forked it under a new name: “The Lounge”.

This fork aims to be community managed, meaning that the decisions are taken in a collegial fashion, and that a bunch of maintainers should be able to make the review process quicker and more streamlined.

Installation and usage

The Lounge requires Node.js v4 or more recent.

Running stable releases from npm (recommended)

Run this in a terminal to install (or upgrade) the latest stable release from npm:

[sudo] npm install -g thelounge

When installation is complete, run:

lounge start

For more information, read the documentation, wiki, or run:

lounge --help

Running from source

The following commands install the development version of The Lounge:

git clone https://github.com/thelounge/lounge.git
cd lounge
npm install
npm start

A word of caution:

• While it is the most recent codebase, this is not production-ready!
• It is not recommended to run this as root. However, if you decide to do so, you will have to run npm run build.

Development setup

Simply follow the instructions to run The Lounge from source above, on your own fork.

Before submitting any change, make sure to:

• Read the Contributing instructions
• Run npm test to execute linters and test suite
• Run npm run build if you change or add anything in client/js/libs or client/views