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, and even host XMPP for multiple domains.

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; the developers appear to be asleep at the wheel, e.g. Ticket #15508 Support for XEP-0280: Message Carbons.