Installing our XMPP server

Installing Prosody on an Ubuntu system is very easy since it is included in the main package repositories. In order to install Prosody, run the following command at the command line:

$ sudo apt-get install prosody

Prosody can then be started and stopped using the following standard methods:

$ sudo service prosody start
$ sudo service prosody stop

If you are not using Ubuntu, then Prosody may be available via your respective package manager. The best installation instructions for Prosody can be found at http://prosody.im/doc/install.

Prosody also produces Docker images of their releases, which are available from the official Docker hub: https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/prosody/prosody/ .

By default, Prosody will store its configuration file at /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua. The configuration file itself is rather simple and is written in the Lua language, which is the same language in which the Prosody server is written.

Shown here is the configuration file we are going to use throughout this book. Following the configuration example is an explanation of each part of these settings. As always, for the most up-to-date and detailed information, please visit the Prosody website (http://prosody.im):

modules_enabled = { 
        "roster"; 
        "saslauth"; 
        "tls"; 
        "dialback"; 
        "disco"; 
        "version"; 
        "uptime"; 
        "time"; 
        "ping", 
        "register"; 
        "posix"; 
        "bosh"; 
}; 
allow_registration = true; 
daemonize = true; 
consider_bosh_secure = true; 
cross_domain_bosh = true; 
pidfile = "/var/run/prosody/prosody.pid"; 
c2s_require_encryption = false 
authentication = "internal_plain" 
 
log = { 
        debug = "/var/log/prosody/prosody.log"; 
        error = "/var/log/prosody/prosody.err"; 
        { levels = { "error" }; to = "syslog";  }; 
} 
 
VirtualHost "localhost" 
    enabled = true 
    ssl = { 
        key = "/etc/prosody/certs/example.com.key"; 
        certificate = "/etc/prosody/certs/example.com.crt"; 
    } 
 
VirtualHost "anon.localhost" 
   authentication = "anonymous" 
 
Component "component.localhost" 
    component_secret = "mysecretcomponentpassword" 

Now, let's discuss each of the sections of the configuration file:

Then we save this configuration file to /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua and restart the server:

$ sudo service prosody restart

Next, we're going to test our Prosody setup. First, we will test whether Prosody is listening to the client-to-server (C2S) and server-to-server (S2S) ports. By default, with XMPP, the C2S port is 5222 and the S2S port is 5269. We can perform a quick and easy test using telnet. If your server is running as expected, you will see an output similar to the following screenshot:

Testing Prosody connections using telnet

Next, we will also verify whether we have set up our BOSH endpoint correctly by visiting the endpoint in a browser, by visiting http://localhost:5280/http-bind/, port number 5280 being the default BOSH port, we should see the following screenshot:

Testing Prosody's BOSH endpoint from a browser

Prosody has a great command-line utility, prosodyctl, which allows us to create and update user accounts as well as command the server. Here, we're going to use it to create our first XMPP account on the server. Type the following command in the command line:

$ sudo prosodyctl adduser test@localhost

You will then be prompted to enter a password. Let's use the Password password for now. Once this is complete, we have our XMPP account. We'll test this with a client in a moment.

Lastly, we'll install a standard desktop XMPP client, which will allow us to interact with our code. A list of XMPP clients is held on the XMPP website (http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/). Find one suitable for your platform and follow the installation instructions.

In this book, we're going to use Empathy (https://live.gnome.org/Empathy) since it comes installed as standard in the Ubuntu desktop: