May 16 2013

Last week, I decided that it was time to migrate one of my services away from Google: XMPP for IM. The nice thing about XMPP is that you don’t have to totally drop support for your old identity: since Google still uses it (for now), you can get online with both.

Here’s how:

I set mine up with Digital Ocean, because my friends told me it was rad. It was pretty damn easy.

Once you have a server, you need to set up all the usual stuff: a non-privledged user account, yadda, yadda. I’m assuming you can do that.

Install ejabberd

I picked ejabberd for my server software because it’s used by a lot of people.

EDIT: I just got a tweet from @jamesgolick, who I trust to know stuff about stuff. He says:

ejabberd is buggy. Use the erlangsolutions fork instead. - @jamesgolick

So, take that for what it’s worth.

Anyway, since I use Arch Linux, installing was as easy as

$ sudo pacman -S ejabberd

After that was over, time to edit the config. ejabberd is written in Erlang, and so it uses Erlang for its config. Don’t worry! It’s easy. Just copy and paste these bits in, or change them if there’s something like them in your config:

{hosts, ["localhost", "xmpp.steveklabnik.com"]}.{acl, admin, {user, "steve", "xmpp.steveklabnik.com"}}.

These change my host to xmpp.steveklabnik.com as well as localhost and set my admin user to steve@xmpp.steveklabnik.com.

Next up, we boot the node:

sudo ejabberdctl start

And then register a way to administer things via the web interface:

sudo ejabberdctl register steve xmpp.steveklabnik.com $password

Of course, change those to be your values, and change $password to your password. Now that you’ve typed a password into the command line, it’s good to clean out your bash history. When I did this, typing history showed this:

 35  sudo ejabberdctl register ....

So, do this:

$ history -d 35$ history -w

Or, to nuke everything:

$ history -c$ history -w

Anywho, now that that’s over, you need to go to your domain registrar and insert an A record pointing at your server. I use NameCheap.

Now that that’s done, hit this page in your browser:

http://xmpp.steveklabnik.com:5280/admin/

The trailing slash is important, and obviously, you need to change it to be your server. Given that the DNS isn’t cached wrong, you should get a popup asking you to log in. Do so with the credentials you typed in on the command line up there. If you can log in, great! Everything should be working.

Let’s turn off registration, though. Go back to your ejabberd config, /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg:

{access, register, [{deny, all}]}.

You probably have one that says allow, so just change it. Check in your admin panel on the site that it’s the same.

Bam! That’s it. This whole process took me about an hour, including writing this blog post. I do have some experience with VPSes, though.

If I can help free you of Google in any way, ping me at steve@xmpp.steveklabnik.com.