Five years ago I started a small GitHub project aimed to run Bitlbee seamlessly in a container.
Why Bitlbee?
Back in the day, I was relying heavily on IRC for my daily communications and the plethora of other protocols that were starting to get traction was too much: I wanted to have a bridge between my IRC client and the other protocols to be able to communicate only by using my IRC client without installing any resource consuming monster (enough said).
Bitlbee was and still is the perfect tool to implement that bridge: every protocol is consumable via IRC, provided that a Bitlbee server has been set up and a bridge between Bitlbee and the protocol is available and installed into the Bitlbee server.
I decided to roll my server of Bitlbee running in a Docker container, and I decided to integrate into the build a list of custom protocols that were available as plugins for Bitlbee. By packaging everything into a container, running a ready to use Bitlbee server with custom protocols was only a docker pull away.
The container, called docker-bitlbee and published to Docker Hub, started to get traction (who wants to compile all the plugins nowadays?) and in 2018 I reached 100k downloads on Docker Hub.
It is also the first result for the SERP “docker bitlbee” on DuckDuckGo and Google.
With time, contributors started to submit pull requests to enable new custom protocols, reporting problems and asking for new features.
Now the container has been downloaded more than 500k times on Docker Hub and I am still using it in my infrastructure to access some protocols over IRC (a notable example: Gitter).
The latest feature that I just added, based on a user request, is TLS termination to Bitlbee via stunnel. There has been some constructive discussion, and I am glad that the community is supportive and confrontational.
So far, I am very proud of the work that contributed to this side project.
