tl;dr — click here to try it: log in with a nick, then
/j grappaon the azzurra server. You’re in.
The screenshot above is cicchetto — the grappa PWA — running on my iPhone, on the live Azzurra network, in #it-opers. Look closely and you’ll catch what it’s showing: me and vjt-claude working out the outline of this very post. That’s the update in one image. grappa stopped being a README and a green CI badge. It’s the thing I read IRC from now, every day, from the couch.
For anyone just tuning in¶
A bouncer and its frontends, one repo:
- grappa — an always-on IRC bouncer with a REST API. It stays connected so you don’t have to; your phone just talks HTTP to it.
- cicchetto — a PWA that looks like irssi and speaks only REST. It never parses a line of IRC. You install it on your home screen like an app.
- shottino — a standalone terminal client (ncurses, C) over the same REST + WebSocket surface. Same bouncer, same session — for when you want IRC back in a terminal instead of a browser. It doesn’t parse IRC either; the protocol stays on the server.
The whole pitch, from back in April: modern IRC — always-on, usable from a phone — without making it not-IRC. If that sentence does anything for you, you’re the audience.
A nick is all you need to get in. The password is only for registered users — and registration only exists if you run your own grappa. Either way the bouncer is doing the real work: it stays connected to IRC for you, whether the app is open or not. Close the tab, come back later, reopen — you’re still on, and you pick the conversation back up. Scrollback rides along, a rolling window the bouncer holds for you, so remembering it isn’t your phone’s job.
What changed: people actually use it¶
Last time, MVP was “close”. It arrived. grappa now runs in production for the #it-opers regulars — people who aren’t me, on their own devices:
- someone tried it from an iPhone (“not bad”), someone else from Firefox on the desktop
- I run it on my phone and my laptop at the same time — same session, same scrollback, two screens
- it does file and image upload — in fact the cover of this post was uploaded through grappa itself and dropped into the channel from my phone
- scrollback persists across restarts, channel switching is instant
It’s not finished. It’s used. Those are different milestones, and this is the second one.
A few things under the hood¶
Just the texture — the full engineering story is in the April writeup, which is the post to read if you want the why:
- IRC is terminated at the server. The browser never sees the protocol. cicchetto is IRC-ignorant end to end; it only knows REST resources and a WebSocket event push.
- One supervised process per user, on the Erlang BEAM. Your upstream connection dying is your problem alone — nobody else’s session even notices. The Elixir-on-BEAM bet paying off exactly as advertised.
- Read state lives on the server, not the client. The unread marker is a server-owned cursor, so the same line is “last read” whether you next open your phone or your laptop.
Three bullets; there’s a test pipeline and a design decision behind each of them.
The honest part¶
Still pre-alpha. Self-hosting works today via Docker Compose, but it isn’t friendly yet — TLS verification, scrollback eviction, the NickServ proxy, mobile polish, real docs are all still open. I hit bugs every week and file them as I go. What I won’t pretend: that this is finished. What I will say: the round trip — IRC ↔ grappa ↔ cicchetto — is solid, and using it is genuinely pleasant.
Come kick the tyres¶
Repo’s open as always: github.com/vjt/grappa-irc. Issues welcome — that’s most of how the bugs get found. Open grappa — the same PWA in the screenshots above — log in, then on the azzurra server just /j grappa (the # is optional). There you’ll find vjt-claude — the AI I handed the project context to — or me, when I’m around. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go read the rest of this channel. From my phone.