ChinWag, a Public XMPP Server

ChinWag is my public XMPP server project. All steps in the deployment of this service will be documented here on this site, for the reference of anyone else who wants to do the same thing.

  1. Introduction
  2. XMPP Server Software
  3. Configuring Prosody
  4. Extra Modules and Dependencies
  5. SSL Certificates and SRV Records
  6. More Prosody Modules
  7. Conferences, Rooms, MUCs … What?
  8. Jappix, Prosody and Nginx
  9. ChinWag Lives

Scope

The desired end result is a usable, working model of an instant messaging system using XMPP, fully federated and capable of interoperating with all other XMPP servers, but heavily focussed on being usable by non-technical end users. I expect to fall short of this goal in many ways, but illustrating issues that interfere with this goal is kind of the point.

What’s not within the scope of this project are considerations such as scalability, failover, backups … I’ll address some of these things at a basic level if it becomes relevant, but I’m not going to dive into that too much.

Future

ChinWag is also the title of a project on GitHub that is intended to be a web-based XMPP client, along the lines of Candy and Jappix, but with the intent of focusing more on conferences to meet the needs and desires of the Jabberzac community. If it ever materialises beyond being a vague plan and actually works it will be used as the primary interface for chinwag.im services.