A Screencast of this tutorial is available here.

An eggdrop is a robot that will connect to an IRC network and will protect a “channel” (discussion space) so as to retain control over it. It's programmed in C and works using scripts.

Before installing an eggdrop, you'll need a C library and a compiler.

Begin by installing the library by entering the following command:

apt-get install libc6-dev

Confirm the update by pressing the “Y” key.

Once completed, you will need to install a compiler. Gcc will do:

apt-get install gcc

Confirm the update by pressing the “Y” key.

Then, install the TCL (Tool Command Language), the language script used by bots.

apt-get install tcl8.4-dev

If you only have a root account, create a new account in which you'll install your eggdrop. Here, we've going to create a new user account on your server called “eggdrop”, with the adduser command.

adduser eggdrop

Define a password for this new account..

You now have a new eggdrop folder created at the path /home/eggdrop/

The latest version of eggdrop is 1.6.18, dated 14 July 2006, and is available on several servers, including ftp://ftp.eggheads.org/pub/eggdrop/source/1.6/eggdrop1.6.18.tar.gz. Download it into your newly created path, /home/eggdrop/, par exemple.

wget ftp://ftp.eggheads.org/pub/eggdrop/source/1.6/eggdrop1.6.18.tar.gz

The file being compressed, we'll need to decompress it:

tar zxvf eggdrop1.6.18.tar.gz

You can now delete the deleted file you have just downloaded:

rm eggdrop1.6.18.tar.gz

Now, let's compile the eggdrop. To do so, go into the newly created /eggdrop1.6.18 and type:

./configure

Once this is done, you will be asked to run a “make” command for config. You'll therefore need to install the “make” module on your server (using the same method as before, going into root mode and typing: “apt-get install make”) if you don't already have it. Once you have the “make” module, type the following command:

make config

The shell window should tell you that the operation was succesful, and that the bot is ready to be compiled..

Compile away! Make sure you're in the /home/eggdrop/eggdrop1.6.18 directory and run the following two commands in succession:

make
make install

Now, you need to edit the eggdrop's configuration file. It is this file which contains the parameter's regarding which IRC server it will connect to, in what “channel”, the user list and user rights…

In our example, the file is in the home/eggdrop/eggdrop1.6.18 directory and is called eggdrop.conf

nano /home/bot/eggdrop1.6.18/eggdrop.conf

Once it is configured, you just need to launch it. The first time, you'll need to type:

./eggdrop -m

The ”-m” indicates you want the changes made to the file to be made effective. The following times, you'll just need to type, and add the ”-m” whenever you've brought a change to the eggdrop.conf file.

./eggdrop