The sys admin's daily grind: Prosody
Speed Chat
Columnist Charly Kühnast has been looking into the options of running an instant messaging back end. He chose a particularly lean and easily extendable version.
Prosody [1] is a lean XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, formerly known as Jabber) server in Lua. It can speak IPv6, supports encrypted transport and – in the default configuration – very little else. You can, however, extend Prosody with modules to add virtually any kind of functionality you need. The number of modules is nearly into three figures [2].
Setting up a basic configuration is a two-step process: You need to create a user and then set up a domain. For my first steps on my home test network, I will be using example.com as the domain, but you can easily replace this with another domain when you go live. The following command sets up the user:
sudo prosodyctl adduser charly@example.com
[...]
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