I'm writing these steps primarily for myself as a reference. However, if someone else finds them useful to great.
Adding XMPP framework to your server. Initially I was going to add Prosody, however as I'm working off an Apache server with Centos 6.10 this quickly proved to a goal that was out of reach. Instead, I pivoted and redirected to Erlang.
- Is your server hardware running Linux, BSD, OS X, or Windows?
- Can you use Java or Python or another language if the server software requires it?
- Do you need to make this server scalable?
- Is it for private use, or public use?
Adding to the server
Begin by downloading erlang from Erlang-Solutions downloads... for more details see our notes on installing erlang.
Using terminal first make a copy of the rpm file from the Process-One site
wget https://www.process-one.net/downloads/ejabberd/18.09/ejabberd-18.09-0.x86_64.rpm wget https://www.process-one.net/downloads/downloads-action.php?file=/ejabberd/19.02/ejabberd-19.02-0.x86_64.rpm
...or preferably use Github resource
https://github.com/processone/ejabberd.git
I installed the rpm package in the root directory on the apache server.
Then installed the RPM package
rpm -Uvh ejabberd-19.02-0.x86_64.rpm
Check if the package has been installed
yum info ejabberd
Install Erlang
yum install erlang
Check that Erlang has been installed
erl
If the Erlang package has been successfully installed terminal will be output something like
Erlang/OTP 21 [erts-10.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:48:8] [ds:48:8:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe]
The next step involves setting up ejabberd on the directory for the domain name that you are planning to use. Such as /var/www/vhosts/example.com
git clone git://github.com/processone/ejabberd.git ejabberd cd ejabberd ./autogen.sh
To compile ejabberd execute the commands
./configure
./configure --enable-user=ejabberd --enable-mysql
It isn't recommended to run ejabberd with root user. So tell the configuration to prepare the installed program to run with a user called ejabberd.
make
make install
When these scripts were run, the make request failed. The steps I needed to attend to were
| error | configure: error: OpenSSL 'ssl' library was not found |
| script |
sudo yum install libtool perl-core zlib-devel -y yum install openssl-devel |
I ran the sudo yum install libtool perl-core zlib-devel -y to ensure that there would be no issues with the OpenSSL installation. A great reference site is Black Sail Division page about installing OpenSSL on Centos 7.Also note the OpenSSL was installed on the server and you can check this through running this script
openssl version
By default the version shown will most likely be OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips 11 Feb 2013
| error | configure: error: libexpat header file expat.h was not found |
| script |
yum install expat-devel |
| error | configure: error: libyaml header file yaml.h was not found |
| script |
yum install libyaml-devel |
By default the version shown will most likely be OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips 11 Feb 2013
| error | /usr/lib64/erlang/bin/escript rebar skip_deps=true compile WARN: Missing plugins: [rebar3_hex] |
| script |
$ git clone https://github.com/erlang/rebar3.git |
Post adding the script for the libyaml error... I was able to run the make command without issue.
make
make install
Yay. Okay so now onto the next step, starting ejabberdctl
ejabberdctl start
You need to have started ejabberd before registering, otherwise the ejabberdctl command will not be found. Creating a new user, you need to follow this format
ejabberdctl register <username> <hostname> <password>
However, when I ran the register command I received the Error: cannot_register and this was due to the domain name not being found. I tried multi Google and DuckDuckGo searches that consistently pointed to vi /opt/ejabbered*/conf/ejabberd.yml. I edited this files without success. How did I know it wasn't working, easy as it was a method confirmed by entering the following command
ejabberdctl registered_vhosts
Which outputted the following domains
localhost example.com
So how did I find the correct file to edit? In terminal I cd / and ran a search for ejabberd on the server. The find command is
find / -name ejabberd -type d
This command showed the following results:
/usr/local/share/doc/ejabberd /usr/local/etc/ejabberd /usr/local/var/log/ejabberd /usr/local/var/lib/ejabberd
The file path to be edited was /usr/local/etc/ejabberd. The file ejabberd.yml. Once this was altered, I stopped and restarted ejabberd. Now registered_vhosts was finally showing the correct domain names!