The Jenkins IRC plugin lets you interact with your Jenkins server via an IRC channel, both to receive
notification messages and to issue commands to the server. Like the Jabber plugin, you also need to
install the Instant Messaging plugin for this to work.
8.8. IRC Notification
Contributed by Juven Xu
Internet Relay Chat (or IRC) is a popular form of instant messaging, primarily designed for group
communication in channels. For example, Jenkins has a channel set up on Freenode^2 so users and
developers can discuss Jenkins related topics. You will see many users ask questions and most of the
time more experienced users will be prompt in providing useful answers.
Just like instant messaging through Jabber, you can configure Jenkins to “push” notification through
IRC. Some IRC clients such as xchat^3 support alert configuration so that when the message arrives, it
can blink the tray icon or make a beep sound. To set up IRC support on Jenkins, first you need to install
the IRC plugin^4 and the Instance Messaging plugin^5. Simply go to the standard plugin manager, tick
their checkbox and then restart Jenkins (see Figure 8.14, “Install the Jenkins IRC plugins”).
Figure 8.14. Install the Jenkins IRC plugins
Once it’s done, you need to enable the IRC plugin and configure it to fit into your own environment.
Basically, this involves providing the hostname and port of the IRC server you are using, a dedicated
IRC channel, and a nickname for the IRC plugin. It’s a good practice to set up a dedicated channel for
CI notification, so as people chat in other channels, they won’t be disturbed. You may also want to
configure extra details in the Advanced sector. All of these are available in the Configure System page
(see Figure 8.15, “Advanced IRC notification configuration”).
(^2) http://jenkins-ci.org/content/chat
(^3) http://xchat.org/
(^4) http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/IRC+Plugin
(^5) http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Instant+Messaging+Plugin