Prosody

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Prosody is a light-weight, easy to configure, XMPP server. XMPP is an open and extensible Internet protocol used for communications, presence, identification, authentication etc. It's a big part of the Semantic Web movement which is all about achieving the functionality we need using open standards instead of specific applications.

Configuration

The prosody configuration is in /etc/prosody with a similar style to Apache or Nginx where individual site's configuration each exist in their own file in the conf.avail sub-directory usually having a filename matching the domain name. Sites are then enabled by creating sym-links in the conf.d sub-directory pointing to the available sites.

Here's an example configurtion file for a specific domain which is set up as a chatroom server starting with the familiar VirtualHost directive to indicate the domain that this configuration covers.

VirtualHost "xmpp.organicdesign.nz"

	ssl = { 
		key = "/etc/prosody/certs/xmpp.organicdesign.nz.key";
		certificate = "/etc/prosody/certs/xmpp.organicdesign.nz.crt";
	}

-- use an empty admins list to disable all remote administration functions
admins = { "foo@xmpp.organicdesign.nz" }

Component "conference.xmpp.organicdesign.nz" "muc"
	name = "The dharma.casa XMPP chatrooms server"
	allow_registration = false
	c2s_require_encryption = true
	s2s_require_encryption = true

	-- set admins for the room and ensure only they can create new rooms
	admins = { "admin@xmpp.organicdesign.nz" }
	restrict_room_creation = true

	modules_enabled = {
		"tls",
		"roster",
		"register"
	}

Users

Users are managed from the CLI with prosodyctl, or can be added from a client with sufficient capabilities such as Pidgin if you're using an administrator account. Users can also change their own passwords and other personal information if the client supports it.

Chatrooms

The domain of the chat server is the domain of the "muc" component as as defined in the config, in our case muc.xmpp.organicdesign.nz. Using the configuration above, administrators of the MUC component are able to create new rooms from within their client if it has sufficient capabilities such as Pidgin or Dino.

SSL

If using LetsEncrypt certificates, then they need to be copied into the /etc/prosody/certs dir and owned by prosody. The .crt file corresponds to the fullchain.pem and the .key file to the privkey.pem file. These files will need to be kept up to date whenever the LetsEncrypt certs are updated.

Using the Prosody server that ships with Jitsi

Jitsi comes needs an XMPP server as part of its infrastructure and uses Prosody, so if you're running a Jitsi, then you can easily add another virtual hosts configuration for a dedicated XMPP server as well using the same procedure shown above.

See also

• Official example configuration
• Debian's Prosody installation page
• Some good configuration examples
• Jitsi