Prosody

Prosody is a small and fast XMPP (Jabber) server, written in Lua. You can use it in combination with Conversations for your Android phone, to provide your own federated instant messaging. It also hosts multiple XMPP virtual host domains.

Install

UPDATE October 2017: Version 0.10 was released, which includes Carbons, MAM and Letsencrypt renewal built-in.

On Ubuntu, you can install it like this:

sudo apt-get install prosody

Edit the config /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua to make sure you have BOSH support, group rosters and compression enabled, you probably want self-registration off, and if you want persistent message history across all (compatible) devices (like Hangouts)^[1] you'll need to enable message archive management (MAM) as well:

modules_enabled = {
  "compression";
  "carbons";
  "mam";
  "bosh";
  "groups";
}

allow_registration = false;

...

Configure a virtual host for your domain

Set up a virtual host config for your domain in /etc/prosody/conf.avail/yourdomain.cfg.lua

VirtualHost "yourdomain.com"
    enabled = true
    ssl = {
        key = "/etc/ssl/private/yourdomain.com.key";
        certificate = "/etc/ssl/certs/yourdomain.com.crt";
        -- Ix nay on the SSL-ay (Heartbleed, Poodle, etc.)
        options = {"no_sslv2", "no_sslv3", "no_ticket", "no_compression",
                   "cipher_server_preference", "single_dh_use", "single_ecdh_use"};
    }

-- optional, for IRC-style chatrooms
Component "conference.yourdomain.com" "muc"
    restrict_room_creation = "local"

-- optional, for file transfers
Component "chatproxy.yourdomain.com" "proxy65"

Then enable the config:

ln -s /etc/prosody/conf.avail/yourdomain.cfg /etc/prosody/conf.d/

DNS configuration

You need your chat, conference, and chatproxy subdomains to be A records (not CNAME), and you also need 4 SRV records and a TXT record, thus:

_jabber._tcp.yourdomain.com                  = SRV: 0 5 5269 chat.yourdomain.com
_xmpp-client._tcp.yourdomain.com             = SRV: 0 5 5222 chat.yourdomain.com 
_xmpp-server._tcp.yourdomain.com             = SRV: 0 5 5269 chat.yourdomain.com
_xmpp-server._tcp.conference.yourdomain.com  = SRV: 0 5 5269 chat.yourdomain.com

TXT: _xmpp-client-xbosh=https://chat.yourdomain.com/http-bind/

Add some users

Add yourself with

  sudo prosodyctl adduser yourusername@yourdomain.com

Enabling sane multi-client support

Message archive management should really use a database:

storage = {
    archive2 = "sql";  -- mam_archive requires SQL storage.
}
sql = { driver = "SQLite3", database = "prosody.db" } 
default_archive_policy = true;
max_archive_query_results = 100;

PostgreSQL and MySQL are also supported. For SQL to work, you will need to install additional dependencies, for example:

apt install lua-dbi-sqlite lua-dbi-postgresql

Links

↑ Then don't use Pidgin; the developers appear to be asleep at the wheel, e.g. Ticket #15508 Support for XEP-0280. That said, here's how to patch it.