Instant Messaging with Prosody on Debian Squeeze

Hello friends!. Today I present to you a modern and flexible server Jabber / XMPP, written in the language Moon and formerly known as Lxmppd. It has the characteristics of being a multiple platform system, with very low resource consumption, easy to use, and extensible. And without further ado, let's get down to business! They may seem like many aspects, but they really are simple and short. We'll see now:

• Base server
• We install necessary packages
• Let's learn to configure
• We configure global parameters
• We create and configure the virtual host
• We generate SSL / TLS certificates
• We enable the host
• We create the first user
• We register our Prosody in a DNS
• We check everything

Base server
The low consumption of resources allows us to install the Prosody even in our own workstation and provide the Chat service from it.

We install necessary packages
To get familiar with the Prosody, we are going to use the official packages that come in the Squeeze repository:

aptitude install prosody liblue5.1-sec0

Let's learn to configure
Let's read the accompanying documentation /usr/share/doc/prosody/doc/coding_style.txt, to familiarize ourselves with the format used in the configuration files. Let's go to the folder / etc / prosody and we list the existing files and directories. The names of each folder or file are intuitive and clearly denote what they are used for:

• certs: Directory where the SSL / TLS certificates and their private keys will be stored.
• conf.avail: Directory that contains the configuration files of the virtual hosts that we declare as available. It works very similar to what was seen in previous posts about web servers, as in the case of the Nginx sites-available folder.
• conf.d: Folder where the direct links of virtual hosts declared in conf.avil and that we want to enable.
• prosody.cfg.lua: main file of the Prosody configuration.
• README: File that gives us a "clue" to move forward. Don't stop reading it!

With what we have read so far, we can try a minimal initial configuration.

We configure the Global parameters
We carefully study the main configuration file/etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua, to which I made a free translation and that we can download at the end. Let's save the original file installed using the following command:

cp /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua.original

We empty the configuration file. With the dwarf, we edit the prosody.cfg.lua already emptied, and paste the content of the downloaded example file. We modify it according to our needs, and save with the usual ctl + or. Later we check the syntax of the configuration file:

cp / dev / null /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua nano /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua luac -p /etc/prosdy/prosody.cfg.lua

And if you do not return any message, it is that everything is fine.

We create and configure the Virtual Host
The file of our virtual host, we will create it in the directory /etc/prosody/conf.avail/with the hostname, plus the extension .conf.lua, and we will create it from the fileexample.com.cfg.lua existing in that folder:

mv /etc/prosody/conf.avail/example.com.cfg.lua /etc/prosody/conf.avail/web.amigos.cu.cfg.lua nano /etc/prosody/conf.avail/web.amigos.cu .cfg.lua

We modify the file with the correct parameters according to our needs. We can download a version consistent with this example at the end of the post. Don't forget to delete the line enabled = false - Remove this line to enable this host.

We generate SSL / TLS certificates
When executing the command to generate the certificates, they will ask us for information related to our company.

cd / etc / prosody / certs openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out "web.amigos.cu.crt" -keyout "web.amigos.cu.key"

We check that the certificates were generated correctly by Ls -l.

We enable the host
To enable the host declared in /etc/prosody/conf.avail/web.amigos.cu.cfg.lua, we must create a symbolic link of that file in the folder conf.d. Then we must restart the service:

ln -s /etc/prosody/conf.avail/web.amigos.cu.cfg.lua /etc/prosody/conf.d/web.amigos.cu.cfg.lua /etc/init.d/prosody restart

Tip:: Open a dedicated console to view Prosody log messages using the command tail -f /var/log/prosody/prosody.log. If the last line says "Successfully daemonized to PID ####", then everything works to the Kilo !. If you happen to get an error message, you may have to manually kill the process "Lua" that it is running BEFORE restarting the Prosody. To know the Pid del Lua, runps -e | grep lua. To kill the process, kill -kill #pid of lua.

We create the first user
To create users we use the command prosodyctl as follows:

prosodyctl adduser admin@web.amigos.cu

The command will ask us for the "Password" user. Notice we create the user "Admin", which we declare as Prosody Administrator in the global configuration file prosody.cfg.lua.

WE RECOMMEND DO NOT use the command prosodyctl to stop, start, or restart the service, but do it by traditional methods such as:

/etc/init.d/prosody {start | stop | restart | reload} invoke-rc.d prosody {start | stop | restart | reload} service prosody {start | stop | restart | reload}

We register our Prosody in a DNS
The instant messaging service relies heavily on the DNS service. Each user is identified by his address or IADB in the way of user @ domain, where the domain indicates the server on which the account is stored. In order for the user to connect and log in, it is necessary to find the IP address of the server. Similarly remote servers need to contact the user @ domain to pass you a message. Therefore, it is necessary that the Prosody server has a record type A in the DNS server of our LAN. For example:

192.168.10.20 IN To web.amigos.cu.

We check everything
We already have our Prosody server running. Let's chat then! Install Pidgin or Psi, or choose the XMPP client of your choice and connect to the server. If he succeeds, it is because then he followed the content of this article to the letter. If not, ask, that's what blogs like this were made for. Ahhh, if you want to chat from a console, install the Finch.

We made a package with the documentation from the Prosody official site, which we hope will be useful. Those who wish to download the packages directly from the Prosody repository, visit Prosody package repository.

To all, good luck and happy Chat!

Download sample files