Prosody

According to the Prosody FAQ it is written in the Lua language and that:

Prosody aims to be simple. Really simple. Whether you are setting up your first Jabber server, or whether you are looking to write server-side code that speaks the Jabber/XMPP protocol, we want to make it easy for you.

Installation and configuration are well covered in their docs.

Before you begin the installation make sure you have JDK 1.6 or higher installed on your system. To invoke the GUI installer issue this command:

java -jar tigase.jar

This is not the exact name of the jar, the real name will depend on your OS and what version of Tigase you downloaded, which currently is tigase-server-5.0.0-b2135.jar).

This will start the installer. It will first ask you to verify your JDK path. If the one it lists is incorrect put in the correct path. Then it will ask you if you would like to install and configure tigase. Click the check box for both of those since it is probably a new installation you are setting up. The configuration will walk you through various configuration options that will be written out to init.properties. This file is what is passed to Tigase when the server starts up so that it is configured to how you want it. The next big choice is what database want Tigase to connect to. Out of the box it supports Postgresql, MySQL, MS SQL Server and Derby (derby is meant to be used only as a test database).

Next you will be asked some basic information like what the initial admin userid will be and it’s password. After you enter this information, you will then have the option to choose some of the more advanced configuration options such as enabling MUC and PUBSUB components. After that, it will initialize the database and generate the init.properties file.

By tradition, Tigase is installed completely into a single directory tree and you set an environment variable that points to this directory:

export TIGASE_HOME=/usr/local/Tigase


making the appropriate changes for your OS and installation directory. Now you are ready to start the server with the following command:

TIGASE_HOME/scripts/tigase.sh start etc/tigase.conf

Tigase comes with a dummy SSL certificate and it would probably be wise to get one for your domain. Look for a later post on this subject. If the server has started successfully, you will find that it has created a TIGASE_HOME/logs directory and started to put the console and process logs in there along with tigase.pid which contains the PID of the current Tigase process.

All modern XMPP Clients make use of DNS SRV records to discover how to connect to an XMPP Server, and since we want to do this install properly, we will add to our DNS entry for the domain the appropriate SRV records.

_xmpp-server._tcp.im 5269

Be wary that every DNS management tool has their own peculiar way of entering these into their system – the two values above are the important parts. Also note that each service, for example PUBSUB or BOSH, will have their own unique SRV record.

Testing your new server is as simple as adding the admin JID to your favourite XMPP Client and then trying to connect.

If everything does not go well, then take a look at the following points to make sure the installation was clean by looking at the log files. Tigase keeps it’s log file at TIGASE_HOME/logs/ and you will find tigase-console.log is a record of all events or errors during startup and tigase.log.0 is where all events or errors are listed during normal operation.

If everything goes well then congratulations, you now have a running XMPP Server. You are now able to send anyone with an XMPP JID a message.

I was originally going to go with subversion as it is the version control system that I am most familiar with and seems to have the most tools for. After doing some research and looking into gitorious’ offering I decided to go that route after some hesitation about going the the process of setting up the whole ruby stack for it. I found this article on the web about setting up gitorious on ubuntu which proved to be quite useful. you can check it out here

The one difference between my installing and that article is that I am using nginx instead of apache. You can find nginx passenger instructions here. The setup wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be and it seems be running quite well and should prove useful to our little project here. Overall I found gitorious to be a nice little system and I was pleasantly surprised.

Expect more posts as we start coding!

Our plan is to use this as a place for Chris and myself (Bear) to post quick notes, items and possibly longer code samples to help show what is possible in the world of XMPP.