Table of Contents
[warning]
Status: Deprecated
This article covers a version of CentOS that is no longer supported. If you are currently operating a server running CentOS 6, we highly recommend upgrading or migrating to a supported version of CentOS.
Reason:
CentOS 6 reached end of life (EOL) on November 30th, 2020 and no longer receives security patches or updates. For this reason, this guide is no longer maintained.
See Instead:
This guide might still be useful as a reference, but may not work on other CentOS releases. If available, we strongly recommend using a guide written for the version of CentOS you are using.
About ejabberd
—-
Ejabberd is a very simple, stable, and powerful XMPP server written in Erlang. This tutorial will guide you through the installation process and basic setup on a CentOS VPS.
Installing ejabberd
—-
First we need to enable EPEL-Repository (EPEL = Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) on your VPS. This is OS dependent:
On a CentOS 5.x VPS
~~~
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-5*.rpm
~~~
On a CentOS 6.x VPS
~~~
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-6*.rpm
~~~
For more information on EPEL, click fedoraproject.org.
After enabling EPEL, we are ready to install ejabberd from the repositories. Do the following as root.
~~~
sudo yum install ejabberd
~~~
Set Hostname
—-
The host name of your ejabberd service is set in the ejabberd config. Edit this with your preferred editor of your choice. In this example, I will be using vim.
~~~
sudo vim /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg
~~~
Find the hostname section (Line #91. It should look something like:
~~~
%%%. ================
%%%' SERVED HOSTNAMES
%% hosts: Domains served by ejabberd.
%% You can define one or several, for example:
%% {hosts, ["example.net", "example.com", "example.org"]}.
%%
{hosts, ["localhost"]}.
~~~
We want to add a new hostname. This is done by editing the last line in the snippet. If we would like to add example.com, it would look like this:
~~~
{hosts, ["localhost","example.com"]}.
~~~
Now that we have added your domain, save the file.
Start the Service
—-
In order to make a new user, we first have to start the service.
~~~
sudo service ejabberd start
~~~
Make a User
—-
To add a new user, run the following command:
~~~
ejabberdctl register username host password
~~~
Replace username, host and password with your own data. For example:
~~~
ejabberdctl register admin example.com superman
~~~
Admin privileges
Now have a user called admin with the password superman, we would like to give this user admin privileges.
We do this by editing the ejabberd configuration file like before. Find the admin user section (Line #369) in the config, which should look something like this:
~~~
%%%. ====================
%%%' ACCESS CONTROL LISTS
%%
%% The 'admin' ACL grants administrative privileges to XMPP accounts.
%% You can put here as many accounts as you want.
%%
%%{acl, admin, {user, "aleksey", "localhost"}}.
%%{acl, admin, {user, "ermine", "example.org"}}.
~~~
Now, add the following line. This will give our user admin rights.
~~~
{acl, admin, {user, "admin", "example.com"}}.
~~~
Remember to restart the ejabberd service every time we change something in the configuration file:
~~~
sudo service ejabberd restart
~~~
Web Interface
—-
Ejabberd ships with a very nice and simple web-interface for statistics, configuration, etc.
You should spend some time browsing the web-interface to get familiar with it, it's quite simple and shouldn't take too long.
To open the web-interface, start a browser and go to:
~~~
http://example.com:5280/admin
~~~
You will need to authenticate with an admin user.
Adding New Users from Web Interface
—-
When you first load up the admin interface, it should look like the following:
Click Virtual hosts -> example.com -> Users.
Here you will be able to add new users, as shown below:
Just click the "Add user" button and it will be created!
Setting Up a Client
—-
In this section, I will be using Gajim. While there are many clients, the steps will be similar to the following with Gajim.
First, download Gajim, install it, and start the client.
We now have to add the newly created user. To do this, go to Edit->Accounts.
Click on the "Add" button, choose "I already have an account i want to use", and press "Forward".
Now enter the account information.
Tick the "Connect when I press Finish" box and click "Finish". You have now connected to your own XMPP server.
