Prosody

Prosody is a small and fast XMPP daemon written in Lua. 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, and you probably want self-registration off:

modules_enabled = {
  "compression";
  "bosh";
  "groups";
  ...
}

allow_registration = false;
bosh_ports = { 5280 };

...

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/star.yourdomain.com.key";
        certificate = "/etc/ssl/certs/star.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 "chatrooms.yourdomain.com" "muc"
    restrict_room_creation = "local"

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

Then enable it with ln -s into /etc/prosody/conf.d

DNS configuration

You need your chat, chatrooms, and chatproxy subdomains to be A records (not CNAME), and you also need 2 SRV records and a TXT record, thus:

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

Want persistent message history everywhere, like Hangouts?^[1] You'll need:

XEP-0198 Stream Management
XEP-0280 Message Carbons
XEP-0313 Message Archive Management

Luckily, these are all in the community contrib repository:

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/

Then copy mod_smacks mod_mam* mod_carbons* into /usr/lib/prosody/modules on your server, and add this to your prosody configuration:

modules_enabled = {
    -- ...
    "smacks";  -- this was a bit unstable in Nov 2014 when I tried it.
    "mam";
    "mam_archive";
    "mam_muc";
    "carbons";
    "carbons_copies";
    -- ...
}

storage = {
    archive2 = "sql";  -- mam_archive requires SQL storage.
}

default_archive_policy = true;
max_archive_query_results = 100;

Links

↑ Then don't use Pidgin.