The sys admin's daily grind: Prosody

Speed Chat

Article from Issue 174/2015
Author(s):

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

You then need to add the account as the administrator to Prosody's central configuration file prosody.cfg.lua. The file typically resides below /etc/prosody/, but it can also live directly in /etc on older systems. The entry for this is:

admins = { "charly@example.com" }

If you like, you can define multiple admins.

Domains

The next step is to describe the example.com domain. You do this in older versions in prosody.cfg.lua, but most up-to-date Prosody systems store this in two separate directories: /etc/prosody/conf.avail and /etc/prosody/conf.d. You create the example.com.cfg.lua configuration file in /etc/prosody/conf.avail. Listing 1 shows that the file only contains a couple of lines.

Listing 1

example.com.cfg.lua

 

The example.com dummy certificate normally comes free with your distribution, and you can replace it with a self-signed or purchased certificate later. To make sure that Prosody recognizes the new domain, I created a symlink to the configuration in the /etc/prosody/conf.d/ directory:

sudo ln -s /etc/prosody/conf.avail/example.com.cfg.lua /etc/prosody/conf.d/

After restarting the XMPP server by typing the following:

sudo service prosody restart

you can log in to the server as the administrator. If you then create a couple more user accounts, you can put on your reading glasses (if you need them) and start chatting right away!

Infos

  1. Prosody: https://prosody.im
  2. Add-on modules for Prosody: https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/w/list

The Author

Charly Kühnast is a Unix operating system administrator at the Data Center in Moers, Germany. His tasks include firewall and DMZ security and availability. He divides his leisure time into hot, wet, and eastern sectors, where he enjoys cooking, freshwater aquariums, and learning Japanese, respectively.

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