Starting screen+irssi at boot
Installing security updates isn’t always enough to apply them; you have to reboot from time to time if you want the benefit of any kernel upgrades that don’t use live patching.
There’s also a small chance that my hosting provider might reboot my VPS. This has only happened once so far, as part of the Spectre/Meltdown mitigation in early 2018. After that reboot, my IRC setup came back to life without any problems as a result of the configuration that I documented in this post.
In both cases, I would like my IRC client to get back online as soon as it can after reboot.
The Easy Way
Create a script in your homedir for starting screen with your desired settings:
$ cat ~/startscreen.sh
#! /bin/bash
screen -dmS irc bash -c '/usr/bin/irssi'
The first line of the script tells your system to run it with bash. The screen command says:
- -dm tells screen to start in detached mode.
- -S irc means that the session will be named irc, which is hard-coded into a couple of scripts I use to automatically connect to it.
- -c /usr/bin/irssi tells screen to start irssi in the newly created session.
As root, add the following line to /etc/rc.local, substituting the correct value for username:
su - username -c "/home/username/startscreen.sh"
Leave exit 0 as the last line in the file.
rc.local is automatically run at the end of each multiuser runlevel, which makes it useful for starting programs at boot.
Without Root
Let’s say that you want to get the above behavior on a system to which you do not have root access.
Hypothetically, one should be able to just drop the line @reboot /usr/bin/screen -dmS irc -c "/usr/bin/irssi" or @reboot /home/username/startscreen.sh into one’s crontab (crontab -e), where it would be executed at startup. This works for most scripts, but screen doesn’t like to start when it’s not attached to a terminal.
The most common workaround for this, in an “if it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid” kind of way, is to SSH to localhost and then start screen. Fortunately, a helpful user named znx typed up the instructions for that process here. Here’s a summary, if you’re on a new install with no authorized keys set yet:
$ ssh-keygen # accept all defaults
$ cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
$ vim ~/.ssh/config
Host lo
HostKeyAlias localhost
HostName localhost
IdentityFile /home/username/.ssh/id_localhost
User username
Port 22
$ ssh lo # accept the key this first time
$ crontab -e # add following line and save
@reboot ssh lo /home/username/startscreen.sh
With systemd
Check out mythmon’s writeup with how to make your own systemd services and configure them to run automatically.
I haven’t tried this yet myself, but I expect that any problems repeating it with screen would be most likely to happen when trying to start a detached screen without a terminal, and could be circumvented by the ssh-to-localhost method described above.
What next?
Having Irssi running is cool, but only really useful if it’s connected to the right newtorks and channels. The irssi docs and freenode sasl guide contain all the necessary information.