Ejabberd User Guide

ejabberd 2.0.
Installation and Operation Guide
ejabberd Development Team

2
Contents
1 Introduction 7
1.1 Key Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2 Additional Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2 Installing ejabberd 11
2.1 Installing ejabberd with Binary Installer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Installing ejabberd with Operating System Specific Packages . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3 Installing ejabberd with CEAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.4 Installing ejabberd from Source Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.4.1 Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4.2 Download Source Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4.3 Compile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4.4 Install . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.4.5 Start . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.4.6 Specific Notes for BSD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.4.7 Specific Notes for Sun Solaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.4.8 Specific Notes for Microsoft Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.5 Create a Jabber Account for Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.6 Upgrading ejabberd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3
4 Contents
3 Configuring ejabberd 19
3.1 Basic Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.1.1 Host Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.1.2 Virtual Hosting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.1.3 Listening Ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3.1.4 Authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.1.5 Access Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.1.6 Shapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.1.7 Default Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.2 Database and LDAP Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.2.1 MySQL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.2.2 Microsoft SQL Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.2.3 PostgreSQL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.2.4 ODBC Compatible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.2.5 LDAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.3 Modules Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.3.1 Modules Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.3.2 Common Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.3.3 mod announce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.3.4 mod disco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.3.5 mod echo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.3.6 mod http bind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.3.7 mod http fileserver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.3.8 mod irc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.3.9 mod last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.3.10 mod muc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.3.11 mod muc log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
3.3.12 mod offline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

CONTENTS 5
3.3.13 mod privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3.14 mod private . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.3.15 mod proxy65 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.3.16 mod pubsub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.3.17 mod register . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3.18 mod roster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.3.19 mod service log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.3.20 mod shared roster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.3.21 mod stats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.3.22 mod time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.3.23 mod vcard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.3.24 mod vcard ldap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.3.25 mod version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4 Managing an ejabberd Server 77
4.1 ejabberdctl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.1.1 Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.1.2 Erlang Runtime System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.2 Web Admin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.3 Ad-hoc Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4.4 Change Computer Hostname . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5 Securing ejabberd 83
5.1 Firewall Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.2 epmd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.3 Erlang Cookie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
5.4 Erlang Node Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
5.5 Securing Sensible Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

6 Contents
6 Clustering 87
6.1 How it Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
6.1.1 Router . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
6.1.2 Local Router . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
6.1.3 Session Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
6.1.4 s2s Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
6.2 Clustering Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
6.3 Service Load-Balancing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.3.1 Components Load-Balancing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.3.2 Domain Load-Balancing Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.3.3 Load-Balancing Buckets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
7 Debugging 91
7.1 Log Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
7.2 Debug Console . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
7.3 Watchdog Alerts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
A Internationalization and Localization 93
B Release Notes 95
C Acknowledgements 97
D Copyright Information 99
Chapter 1
Introduction
ejabberd is a free and open source instant messaging server written in Erlang1 .
ejabberd is cross-platform, distributed, fault-tolerant, and based on open standards to achieve

real-time communication.
ejabberd is designed to be a rock-solid and feature rich XMPP server.
ejabberd is suitable for small deployments, whether they need to be scalable or not, as well as
extremely big deployments.
1 http://www.erlang.org/
7
8 1. Introduction
1.1 Key Features
ejabberd is:
• Cross-platform: ejabberd runs under Microsoft Windows and Unix derived systems such
as Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD.
• Distributed: You can run ejabberd on a cluster of machines and all of them will serve the
same Jabber domain(s). When you need more capacity you can simply add a new cheap
node to your cluster. Accordingly, you do not need to buy an expensive high-end machine
to support tens of thousands concurrent users.
• Fault-tolerant: You can deploy an ejabberd cluster so that all the information required for
a properly working service will be replicated permanently on all nodes. This means that if
one of the nodes crashes, the others will continue working without disruption. In addition,
nodes also can be added or replaced ‘on the fly’.
• Administrator Friendly: ejabberd is built on top of the Open Source Erlang. As a result
you do not need to install an external database, an external web server, amongst others be-
cause everything is already included, and ready to run out of the box. Other administrator
benefits include:
– Comprehensive documentation.
– Straightforward installers for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
– Web Administration.
– Shared Roster Groups.
– Command line administration tool.
– Can integrate with existing authentication mechanisms.
– Capability to send announce messages.
• Internationalized: ejabberd leads in internationalization. Hence it is very well suited in a
globalized world. Related features are:
– Translated to 24 languages.
– Support for IDNA2 .
• Open Standards: ejabberd is the first Open Source Jabber server claiming to fully comply
to the XMPP standard.
– Fully XMPP compliant.
– XML-based protocol.
– Many protocols supported3 .
2 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3490.txt
3 http://www.ejabberd.im/protocols
1.2 Additional Features 9
1.2 Additional Features
Moreover, ejabberd comes with a wide range of other state-of-the-art features:
• Modular
– Load only the modules you want.
– Extend ejabberd with your own custom modules.
• Security
– SASL and STARTTLS for c2s and s2s connections.
– STARTTLS and Dialback s2s connections.
– Web Admin accessible via HTTPS secure access.
• Databases
– Internal database for fast deployment (Mnesia).
– Native MySQL support.
– Native PostgreSQL support.
– ODBC data storage support.
– Microsoft SQL Server support.
• Authentication
– Internal Authentication.
– PAM, LDAP and ODBC.
– External Authentication script.
• Others
– Support for virtual hosting.
– Compressing XML streams with Stream Compression (XEP-01384 ).
– Statistics via Statistics Gathering (XEP-00395 ).
– IPv6 support both for c2s and s2s connections.
– Multi-User Chat6 module with support for clustering and HTML logging.
– Users Directory based on users vCards.
– Publish-Subscribe7 component with support for Personal Eventing via Pubsub8 .
– Support for web clients: HTTP Polling9 and HTTP Binding (BOSH)10 services.
– IRC transport.
– Component support: interface with networks such as AIM, ICQ and MSN installing
special tranports.
4 http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0138.html
10 1. Introduction
Chapter 2
Installing ejabberd
2.1 Installing ejabberd with Binary Installer
Probably the easiest way to install an ejabberd instant messaging server is using the binary in-
staller published by ProcessOne. The binary installers of released ejabberd versions are available
in the ProcessOne ejabberd downloads page: http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/downloads
The installer will deploy and configure a full featured ejabberd server and does not require any
extra dependencies.
In *nix systems, remember to set executable the binary installer before starting it. For example:
chmod +x ejabberd-2.0.0_1-linux-x86-installer.bin
./ejabberd-2.0.0_1-linux-x86-installer.bin
ejabberd can be started manually at any time, or automatically by the operating system at
system boot time.
To start and stop ejabberd manually, use the desktop shortcuts created by the installer. If the
machine doesn’t have a graphical system, use the scripts ’start’ and ’stop’ in the ’bin’ directory
where ejabberd is installed.
The Windows installer also adds ejabberd as a system service, and a shortcut to a debug console
for experienced administrators. If you want ejabberd to be started automatically at boot time,
go to the Windows service settings and set ejabberd to be automatically started. Note that
the Windows service is a feature still in development, and for example it doesn’t read the file
ejabberdctl.cfg.
On a *nix system, if you want ejabberd to be started as daemon at boot time, copy ejabberd.init
from the ’bin’ directory to something like /etc/init.d/ejabberd (depending on your distribu-
tion) and call /etc/inid.d/ejabberd start to start it.
If ejabberd doesn’t start correctly in Windows, try to start it using the shortcut in desktop
or start menu. If the window shows error 14001, the solution is to install: ”Microsoft Visual
11
12 2. Installing ejabberd
C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package”. You can download it from www.microsoft.com1 . Then
uninstall ejabberd and install it again.
If ejabberd doesn’t start correctly and a crash dump is generated, there was a severe problem.
You can try starting ejabberd with the script bin/live.bat in Windows, or with the com-
mand bin/ejabberdctl live in other Operating Systems. This way you see the error message
provided by Erlang and can identify what is exactly the problem.
The ejabberdctl administration script is included in the bin directory. Please refer to the
section 4.1 for details about ejabberdctl, and configurable options to fine tune the Erlang
runtime system.
2.2 Installing ejabberd with Operating System Specific Pack-

ages
Some Operating Systems provide a specific ejabberd package adapted to the system architecture
and libraries. It usually also checks dependencies and performs basic configuration tasks like
creating the initial administrator account. Some examples are Debian and Gentoo. Consult the
resources provided by your Operating System for more information.
Usually those packages create a script like /etc/init.d/ejabberd to start and stop ejabberd
as a service at boot time.
2.3 Installing ejabberd with CEAN
CEAN2 (Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network) is a repository that hosts binary packages
from many Erlang programs, including ejabberd and all its dependencies. The binaries are
available for many different system architectures, so this is an alternative to the binary installer
and Operating System’s ejabberd packages.
You will have to create your own ejabberd start script depending of how you handle your CEAN
installation. The default ejabberdctl script is located into ejabberd’s priv directory and can
be used as an example.
2.4 Installing ejabberd from Source Code
The canonical form for distribution of ejabberd stable releases is the source code package.
Compiling ejabberd from source code is quite easy in *nix systems, as long as your system have
all the dependencies.
1 http://www.microsoft.com/
2 http://cean.process-one.net/
2.4 Installing ejabberd from Source Code 13
2.4.1 Requirements
To compile ejabberd on a ‘Unix-like’ operating system, you need:
• GNU Make
• GCC
• Libexpat 1.95 or higher
• Erlang/OTP R10B-9 or higher.
• OpenSSL 0.9.6 or higher, for STARTTLS, SASL and SSL encryption. Optional, highly
recommended.
• Zlib 1.2.3 or higher, for Stream Compression support (XEP-01383 ). Optional.
• Erlang mysql library. Optional. For MySQL authentication or storage. See section 3.2.1.
• Erlang pgsql library. Optional. For PostgreSQL authentication or storage. See section
3.2.3.
• PAM library. Optional. For Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). See section 3.1.4.
• GNU Iconv 1.8 or higher, for the IRC Transport (mod irc). Optional. Not needed on
systems with GNU Libc. See section 3.3.8.
2.4.2 Download Source Code
Released versions of ejabberd are available in the ProcessOne ejabberd downloads page: http://www.process-one.net/
Alternatively, the latest development version can be retrieved from the Subversion repository
using this command:
svn co http://svn.process-one.net/ejabberd/trunk ejabberd
2.4.3 Compile
To compile ejabberd execute the commands:
./configure
make
The build configuration script allows several options. To get the full list run the command:
./configure --help
Some options that you may be interested in modifying:
--prefix=/ Specify the path prefix where the files will be copied when running the make install
command.
--enable-pam Enable the PAM authentication method (see section 3.1.4).
--enable-odbc or --enable-mssql Required if you want to use an external database. See

section 3.2 for more information.
--enable-full-xml Enable the use of XML based optimisations. It will for example use CDATA
to escape characters in the XMPP stream. Use this option only if you are sure your Jabber
clients include a fully compliant XML parser.
--disable-transient-supervisors Disable the use of Erlang/OTP supervision for transient

processes.
2.4.4 Install
To install ejabberd in the destination directories, run the command:
make install
Note that you probably need administrative privileges in the system to install ejabberd.
The files and directories created are, by default:
/etc/ejabberd/ Configuration files:
ejabberd.cfg ejabberd configuration file

ejabberdctl.cfg Configuration file of the administration script
inetrc Network DNS configuration
/sbin/ejabberdctl Administration script (see section 4.1)
/var/lib/ejabberd/ .erlang.cookie Erlang cookie file (see section 5.3)

db Mnesia database spool files
ebin Binary Erlang files (*.beam)
priv bin Binary C programs
lib Binary system libraries (*.so)
msgs Translated strings (*.msgs)
/var/log/ejabberd/ Log files (see section 7.1):
ejabberd.log ejabberd service log

sasl.log Erlang/OTP system log
2.4 Installing ejabberd from Source Code 15
2.4.5 Start
You can use the ejabberdctl command line administration script to start and stop ejabberd.
Usage example:
ejabberdctl start
ejabberdctl status
Node ejabberd@localhost is started. Status: started
ejabberd is running
ejabberdctl stop
If ejabberd doesn’t start correctly and a crash dump is generated, there was a severe problem.
You can try starting ejabberd with the command ejabberdctl live to see the error message
provided by Erlang and can identify what is exactly the problem.
Please refer to the section 4.1 for details about ejabberdctl, and configurable options to fine
tune the Erlang runtime system.
2.4.6 Specific Notes for BSD
The command to compile ejabberd in BSD systems is:
gmake
2.4.7 Specific Notes for Sun Solaris
You need to have GNU install, but it isn’t included in Solaris. It can be easily installed if your
Solaris system is set up for blastwave.org4 package repository. Make sure /opt/csw/bin is in
your PATH and run:
pkg-get -i fileutils
If that program is called ginstall, modify the ejabberd Makefile script to suit your system,
for example:
cat Makefile | sed s/install/ginstall/ > Makefile.gi
And finally install ejabberd with:
gmake -f Makefile.gi ginstall

4 http://www.blastwave.org/
2.4.8 Specific Notes for Microsoft Windows
Requirements
To compile ejabberd on a Microsoft Windows system, you need:
• MS Visual C++ 6.0 Compiler
• Erlang/OTP R11B-55
• Expat 2.0.0 or higher6
• GNU Iconv 1.9.27 (optional)
• Shining Light OpenSSL 0.9.8d or higher8 (to enable SSL connections)
• Zlib 1.2.3 or higher9
Compilation
We assume that we will try to put as much library as possible into C:\sdk\ to make it easier to
track what is install for ejabberd.
1. Install Erlang emulator (for example, into C:\sdk\erl5.5.5).
2. Install Expat library into C:\sdk\Expat-2.0.0 directory.

Copy file C:\sdk\Expat-2.0.0\Libs\libexpat.dll to your Windows system directory
(for example, C:\WINNT or C:\WINNT\System32)
3. Build and install the Iconv library into the directory C:\sdk\GnuWin32.
Copy file C:\sdk\GnuWin32\bin\lib*.dll to your Windows system directory (more in-
stallation instructions can be found in the file README.woe32 in the iconv distribution).
Note: instead of copying libexpat.dll and iconv.dll to the Windows directory, you can
add the directories C:\sdk\Expat-2.0.0\Libs and C:\sdk\GnuWin32\bin to the PATH
environment variable.
4. Install OpenSSL in C:\sdk\OpenSSL and add C:\sdk\OpenSSL\lib\VC to your path or

copy the binaries to your system directory.
5. Install ZLib in C:\sdk\gnuWin32. Copy C:\sdk\GnuWin32\bin\zlib1.dll to your system

directory. If you change your path it should already be set after libiconv install.
6. Make sure the you can access Erlang binaries from your path. For example: set PATH=%PATH%;"C:\sdk\erl
5 http://www.erlang.org/download.html
6 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group id=10127&package id=11277
7 http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/
8 http://www.slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html
9 http://www.zlib.net/
2.5 Create a Jabber Account for Administration 17
7. Depending on how you end up actually installing the library you might need to check and
tweak the paths in the file configure.erl.
8. While in the directory ejabberd\src run:
configure.bat
nmake -f Makefile.win32
9. Edit the file ejabberd\src\ejabberd.cfg and run
werl -s ejabberd -name ejabberd
2.5 Create a Jabber Account for Administration
You need a Jabber account and grant him administrative privileges to enter the ejabberd Web
Admin:
1. Register a Jabber account on your ejabberd server, for example [email protected].

There are two ways to register a Jabber account:
(a) Using ejabberdctl (see section 4.1):
ejabberdctl register admin1 example.org FgT5bk3
(b) Using a Jabber client and In-Band Registration (see section 3.3.17).
2. Edit the ejabberd configuration file to give administration rights to the Jabber account
you created:
{acl, admins, {user, "admin1", "example.org"}}.

{access, configure, [{allow, admins}]}.
You can grant administrative privileges to many Jabber accounts, and also to accounts in
other Jabber servers.
3. Restart ejabberd to load the new configuration.
4. Open the Web Admin (http://server:port/admin/) in your favourite browser. Make
sure to enter the full JID as username (in this example: [email protected]. The reason
that you also need to enter the suffix, is because ejabberd’s virtual hosting support.
2.6 Upgrading ejabberd
To upgrade an ejabberd installation to a new version, simply uninstall the old version, and then
install the new one. Of course, it is important that the configuration file and Mnesia database
spool directory are not removed.
ejabberd automatically updates the Mnesia table definitions at startup when needed. If you
also use an external database for storage of some modules, check if the release notes of the new
ejabberd version indicates you need to also update those tables.
Chapter 3
Configuring ejabberd
3.1 Basic Configuration
The configuration file will be loaded the first time you start ejabberd. The content from this
file will be parsed and stored in the internal ejabberd database. Subsequently the configuration
will be loaded from the database and any commands in the configuration file are appended to
the entries in the database.
Note that ejabberd never edits the configuration file. So, the configuration changes done using
the Web Admin are stored in the database, but are not reflected in the configuration file. If you
want those changes to be use after ejabberd restart, you can either edit the configuration file,
or remove all its content.
The configuration file contains a sequence of Erlang terms. Lines beginning with a ‘%’ sign are
ignored. Each term is a tuple of which the first element is the name of an option, and any further
elements are that option’s values. If the configuration file do not contain for instance the ‘hosts’
option, the old host name(s) stored in the database will be used.
You can override the old values stored in the database by adding next lines to the configuration
file:
override_global.
override_local.
override_acls.
With these lines the old global options (shared between all ejabberd nodes in a cluster), local
options (which are specific for this particular ejabberd node) and ACLs will be removed before
new ones are added.
3.1.1 Host Names
The option hosts defines a list containing one or more domains that ejabberd will serve.
19
20 3. Configuring ejabberd
Examples:
• Serving one domain:
{hosts, ["example.org"]}.
• Serving one domain, and backwards compatible with older ejabberd versions:
{host, "example.org"}.
• Serving two domains:
{hosts, ["example.net", "example.com"]}.
3.1.2 Virtual Hosting
Options can be defined separately for every virtual host using the host config option. It has
the following syntax:
{host_config, <hostname>, [<option>, <option>, ...]}.
Examples:
• Domain example.net is using the internal authentication method while domain example.com
is using the LDAP server running on the domain localhost to perform authentication:
{host_config, "example.net", [{auth_method, internal}]}.
{host_config, "example.com", [{auth_method, ldap},

{ldap_servers, ["localhost"]},
{ldap_uids, [{"uid"}]},
{ldap_rootdn, "dc=localdomain"},
{ldap_rootdn, "dc=example,dc=com"},
{ldap_password, ""}]}.
• Domain example.net is using ODBC to perform authentication while domain example.com

is using the LDAP servers running on the domains localhost and otherhost:
{host_config, "example.net", [{auth_method, odbc},

{odbc_server, "DSN=ejabberd;UID=ejabberd;PWD=ejabberd"}]}.
{host_config, "example.com", [{auth_method, ldap},

{ldap_servers, ["localhost", "otherhost"]},
{ldap_uids, [{"uid"}]},
{ldap_rootdn, "dc=localdomain"},
{ldap_rootdn, "dc=example,dc=com"},
{ldap_password, ""}]}.
3.1 Basic Configuration 21
To define specific ejabberd modules in a virtual host, you can define the global modules option
with the common modules, and later add specific modules to certain virtual hosts. To accomplish
that, instead of defining each option in host config with the syntax
{<option-name>, <option-value>}
use this syntax:
{{add, <option-name>}, <option-value>}
In this example three virtual hosts have some similar modules, but there are also other different
modules for some specific virtual hosts:
%% This ejabberd server has three vhosts:

{hosts, ["one.example.org", "two.example.org", "three.example.org"]}.
%% Configuration of modules that are common to all vhosts

{modules,
[
{mod_roster, []},
{mod_configure, []},
{mod_disco, []},
{mod_private, []},
{mod_time, []},
{mod_last, []},
{mod_version, []}
]}.
%% Add some modules to vhost one:

{host_config, "one.example.org",
[{{add, modules}, [
{mod_echo, [{host, "echo-service.one.example.org"}]}
{mod_http_bind, []},
{mod_logxml, []}
]
}
]}.
%% Add a module just to vhost two:

{host_config, "two.example.org",
[{{add, modules}, [
{mod_echo, [{host, "mirror.two.example.org"}]}
]
}
]}.
3.1.3 Listening Ports
The option listen defines for which addresses and ports ejabberd will listen and what services
will be run on them. Each element of the list is a tuple with the following elements:
• Port number.
• Module that serves this port.
• Options to this module.
The available modules, their purpose and the options allowed by each one are:
ejabberd c2s Handles c2s connections.

Options: access, certfile, inet6, ip, max stanza size, shaper, starttls, starttls required,
tls, zlib
ejabberd s2s in Handles incoming s2s connections.

Options: inet6, ip, max stanza size
ejabberd service Interacts with an external component1 (as defined in the Jabber Component
Protocol (XEP-01142 ).
Options: access, hosts, inet6, ip, shaper, service check from
ejabberd http Handles incoming HTTP connections.

Options: certfile, http bind, http poll, inet6, ip, request handlers, tls, web admin
This is a detailed description of each option allowed by the listening modules:
{access, <access rule>} This option defines access to the port. The default value is all.
{certfile, Path} Full path to a file containing the default SSL certificate. To define a certifi-
cate file specific for a given domain, use the global option domain certfile.
service check from This option can be used with ejabberd service only. It is used to disable
control on the from field on packets send by an external components. The option can be
either true or false. The default value is true which conforms to XEP-01143 .
{hosts, [Hostnames], [HostOptions]} The external Jabber component that connects to this
ejabberd service can serve one or more hostnames. In HostOptions you can define
options for the component; currently the only allowed option is the password required to
the component when attempt to connect to ejabberd: {password, Secret}. Note that
you cannot define in a single ejabberd service components of different services: add an
ejabberd service for each service, as seen in an example below.
1 http://www.ejabberd.im/tutorials-transports
http bind This option enables HTTP Binding (XEP-01244 and XEP-02065 ) support. HTTP
Bind enables access via HTTP requests to ejabberd from behind firewalls which do not
allow outgoing sockets on port 5222.
Remember that you must also install and enable the module mod http bind.
If HTTP Bind is enabled, it will be available at http://server:port/http-bind/. Be
aware that support for HTTP Bind is also needed in the Jabber client. Remark also
that HTTP Bind can be interesting to host a web-based Jabber client such as JWChat6
(check the tutorials to install JWChat with ejabberd and an embedded local web server7
or Apache8 ).
http poll This option enables HTTP Polling (XEP-00259 ) support. HTTP Polling enables
access via HTTP requests to ejabberd from behind firewalls which do not allow outgoing
sockets on port 5222.
If HTTP Polling is enabled, it will be available at http://server:port/http-poll/. Be
aware that support for HTTP Polling is also needed in the Jabber client. Remark also that
HTTP Polling can be interesting to host a web-based Jabber client such as JWChat10 .
inet6 Set up the socket for IPv6 instead of IPv4. Note: this option is not required for S2S out-
going connections, because when ejabberd attempts to establish a S2S outgoing connection
it first tries IPv4, and if that fails it attempts with IPv6.
{ip, IPAddress} This option specifies which network interface to listen for. For example
{ip, {192, 168, 1, 1}}.
{max stanza size, Size} This option specifies an approximate maximum size in bytes of XML
stanzas. Approximate, because it is calculated with the precision of one block of readed
data. For example {max_stanza_size, 65536}. The default value is infinity. Rec-
ommended values are 65536 for c2s connections and 131072 for s2s connections. s2s max
stanza size must always much higher than c2s limit. Change this value with extreme care
as it can cause unwanted disconnect if set too low.
{request handlers, [{Path, Module}]} To define one or several handlers that will serve
HTTP requests. The Path is a list of strings; so the URIs that start with that Path will
be served by Module. For example, if you want mod foo to serve the URIs that start with
/a/b/, and you also want mod http bind to serve the URIs /http-bind/, use this option:
{request handlers, [{["a", "b"], mod foo}, {["http-bind"], mod http bind}]}
{service check from, true|false} By enabling this option, ejabberd allows the component
to send packets with any arbitrary domain in the ’from’ attribute. Note that XEP-011411
requires that the domain must match the hostname of the component. Only enable this
option if you are completely sure you need to enable it. Default value: false.
{shaper, <access rule>} This option defines a shaper for the port (see section 3.1.6). The
default value is none.
6 http://jwchat.sourceforge.net/
7 http://www.ejabberd.im/jwchat-localserver
8 http://www.ejabberd.im/jwchat-apache
10 http://jwchat.sourceforge.net/
starttls This option specifies that STARTTLS encryption is available on connections to the
port. You should also set the certfile option. You can define a certificate file for a specific
domain using the global option domain certfile.
starttls required This option specifies that STARTTLS encryption is required on connections
to the port. No unencrypted connections will be allowed. You should also set the certfile
option. You can define a certificate file for a specific domain using the global option
domain certfile.
tls This option specifies that traffic on the port will be encrypted using SSL immediately after
connecting. You should also set the certfile option.
web admin This option enables the Web Admin for ejabberd administration which is available
at http://server:port/admin/. Login and password are the username and password of
one of the registered users who are granted access by the ‘configure’ access rule.
zlib This option specifies that Zlib stream compression (as defined in XEP-013812 ) is available
on connections to the port. Client connections cannot use stream compression and stream
encryption simultaneously. Hence, if you specify both tls (or ssl) and zlib, the latter
option will not affect connections (there will be no stream compression).
There are some additional global options:
{s2s use starttls, true|false} This option defines whether to use STARTTLS for s2s con-
nections.
{s2s certfile, Path} Full path to a file containing a SSL certificate.
{domain certfile, Domain, Path} Full path to the file containing the SSL certificate for a
specific domain.
{s2s default policy, allow|deny} The default policy for incoming and outgoing s2s connec-
tions to other Jabber servers. The default value is allow.
{{s2s host, Host}, allow|deny} Defines if incoming and outgoing s2s connections with a
specific remote host are allowed or denied. This allows to restrict ejabberd to only establish
s2s connections with a small list of trusted servers, or to block some specific servers.
{s2s max retry delay, Seconds} The maximum allowed delay for retry to connect after a
failed connection attempt. Specified in seconds. The default value is 300 seconds (5 min-
utes).
For example, the following simple configuration defines:
• There are three domains. The default certificate file is server.pem. However, the c2s and
s2s connections to the domain example.com use the file example com.pem.
• Port 5222 listens for c2s connections with STARTTLS, and also allows plain connections
for old clients.
• Port 5223 listens for c2s connections with the old SSL.
• Port 5269 listens for s2s connections with STARTTLS.
• Port 5280 listens for HTTP requests, and serves the HTTP Poll service.
• Port 5281 listens for HTTP requests, and serves the Web Admin using HTTPS as explained
in section 4.2.
{hosts, ["example.com", "example.org", "example.net"]}.

{listen,
[
{5222, ejabberd_c2s, [
{access, c2s},
{shaper, c2s_shaper},
starttls, {certfile, "/etc/ejabberd/server.pem"},
{max_stanza_size, 65536}
]},
{5223, ejabberd_c2s, [
{access, c2s},
{shaper, c2s_shaper},
tls, {certfile, "/etc/ejabberd/server.pem"},
]},
{5269, ejabberd_s2s_in, [
{shaper, s2s_shaper},
]},
{5280, ejabberd_http, [
http_poll
]},
web_admin,
tls, {certfile, "/etc/ejabberd/server.pem"},
]}
]
}.
{s2s_use_starttls, true}.
{s2s_certfile, "/etc/ejabberd/server.pem"}.
{domain_certfile, "example.com", "/etc/ejabberd/example_com.pem"}.
In this example, the following configuration defines that:
• c2s connections are listened for on port 5222 and 5223 (SSL) and denied for the user called
‘bad’.
• s2s connections are listened for on port 5269 with STARTTLS for secured traffic enabled.
Incoming and outgoing connections of remote Jabber servers are denied, only two servers
can connect: ”jabber.example.org” and ”example.com”.
• Port 5280 is serving the Web Admin and the HTTP Polling service. Note that it is also
possible to serve them on different ports. The second example in section 4.2 shows how
exactly this can be done.
• All users except for the administrators have a traffic of limit 1,000 Bytes/second
• The AIM transport13 aim.example.org is connected to port 5233 with password ‘aimsecret’.
• The ICQ transport JIT (icq.example.org and sms.example.org) is connected to port
5234 with password ‘jitsecret’.
• The MSN transport14 msn.example.org is connected to port 5235 with password ‘msnsecret’.
• The Yahoo! transport15 yahoo.example.org is connected to port 5236 with password
‘yahoosecret’.
• The Gadu-Gadu transport16 gg.example.org is connected to port 5237 with password
‘ggsecret’.
• The Jabber Mail Component17 jmc.example.org is connected to port 5238 with password
‘jmcsecret’.
• The service custom has enabled the special option to avoiding checking the from attribute
in the packets send by this component. The component can send packets in behalf of any
users from the server, or even on behalf of any server.
{acl, blocked, {user, "bad"}}.

{access, c2s, [{deny, blocked},
{allow, all}]}.
{shaper, normal, {maxrate, 1000}}.
{access, c2s_shaper, [{none, admin},
{normal, all}]}.
{listen,
[{5222, ejabberd_c2s, [{access, c2s}, {shaper, c2s_shaper}]},
{5223, ejabberd_c2s, [{access, c2s},
ssl, {certfile, "/path/to/ssl.pem"}]},
{5269, ejabberd_s2s_in, []},
{5280, ejabberd_http, [http_poll, web_admin]},
{5233, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["aim.example.org"],
[{password, "aimsecret"}]}]},
{5234, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["icq.example.org", "sms.example.org"],
[{password, "jitsecret"}]}]},
{5235, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["msn.example.org"],
[{password, "msnsecret"}]}]},
{5236, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["yahoo.example.org"],
[{password, "yahoosecret"}]}]},
{5237, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["gg.example.org"],
13 http://www.ejabberd.im/pyaimt
14 http://www.ejabberd.im/pymsnt
15 http://www.ejabberd.im/yahoo-transport-2
16 http://www.ejabberd.im/jabber-gg-transport
17 http://www.ejabberd.im/jmc
[{password, "ggsecret"}]}]},
{5238, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["jmc.example.org"],
[{password, "jmcsecret"}]}]},
{5239, ejabberd_service, [{hosts, ["custom.example.org"],
[{password, "customsecret"}]},
{service_check_from, false}]}
]
}.
{s2s_use_starttls, true}.
{s2s_certfile, "/path/to/ssl.pem"}.
{s2s_default_policy, deny}.
{{s2s_host,"jabber.example.org"}, allow}.
{{s2s_host,"example.com"}, allow}.
Note, that for jabberd 1.4- or WPJabber-based services you have to make the transports log and
do XDB by themselves:

<log id=’logger’>
<host/>
<logtype/>
<format>%d: [%t] (%h): %s</format>
<file>/var/log/jabber/service.log</file>
</log>

<xdb id="xdb">
<host/>
<load>

<xdb_file>/usr/lib/jabber/xdb_file.so</xdb_file>
</load>
<xdb_file xmlns="jabber:config:xdb_file">
<spool><jabberd:cmdline flag=’s’>/var/spool/jabber</jabberd:cmdline></spool>
</xdb_file>
</xdb>
3.1.4 Authentication
The option auth method defines the authentication method that is used for user authentication:
{auth_method, [<method>]}.
The following authentication methods are supported by ejabberd:
• internal (default) — See section 3.1.4.
• external — There are some example authentication scripts18 .
• ldap — See section 3.2.5.
• odbc — See section 3.2.1, 3.2.3, 3.2.2 and 3.2.4.
• anonymous — See section 3.1.4.
• pam — See section 3.1.4.
Account creation is only supported by internal and odbc methods.
Internal
ejabberd uses its internal Mnesia database as the default authentication method.
• auth method: The value internal will enable the internal authentication method.
Examples:
• To use internal authentication on example.org and LDAP authentication on example.net:
{host_config, "example.org", [{auth_method, [internal]}]}.

{host_config, "example.net", [{auth_method, [ldap]}]}.
• To use internal authentication on all virtual hosts:
{auth_method, internal}.
18 http://www.ejabberd.im/extauth
SASL Anonymous and Anonymous Login
The anonymous authentication method can be configured with the following options. Remember
that you can use the host config option to set virtual host specific options (see section 3.1.2).
Note that there also is a detailed tutorial regarding SASL Anonymous and anonymous login
configuration19 .
• auth method: The value anonymous will enable the anonymous authentication method.
• allow multiple connections: This value for this option can be either true or false and
is only used when the anonymous mode is enabled. Setting it to true means that the same
username can be taken multiple times in anonymous login mode if different resource are
used to connect. This option is only useful in very special occasions. The default value is
false.
• anonymous protocol: This option can take three values: sasl anon, login anon or both.
sasl anon means that the SASL Anonymous method will be used. login anon means that
the anonymous login method will be used. both means that SASL Anonymous and login
anonymous are both enabled.
Those options are defined for each virtual host with the host config parameter (see sec-
tion 3.1.2).
Examples:
• To enable anonymous login on all virtual hosts:
{auth_method, [anonymous]}.
{anonymous_protocol, login_anon}.
• Similar as previous example, but limited to public.example.org:
{host_config, "public.example.org", [{auth_method, [anonymous]},

{anonymous_protocol, login_anon}]}.
• To enable anonymous login and internal authentication on a virtual host:
{host_config, "public.example.org", [{auth_method, [internal,anonymous]},

{anonymous_protocol, login_anon}]}.
• To enable SASL Anonymous on a virtual host:

{anonymous_protocol, sasl_anon}]}.
• To enable SASL Anonymous and anonymous login on a virtual host:

19 http://support.process-one.net/doc/display/MESSENGER/Anonymous+users+support

{anonymous_protocol, both}]}.
• To enable SASL Anonymous, anonymous login, and internal authentication on a virtual

host:
{host_config, "public.example.org", [{auth_method, [internal,anonymous]},

{anonymous_protocol, both}]}.
PAM Authentication
ejabberd supports authentication via Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). PAM is cur-
rently supported in AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD and Solaris. PAM
authentication is disabled by default, so you have to configure and compile ejabberd with PAM
support enabled:
./configure --enable-pam && make install
Options:
pam service This option defines the PAM service name. Default is "ejabberd". Refer to the
PAM documentation of your operation system for more information.
Example:
{auth_method, [pam]}.
{pam_service, "ejabberd"}.
Though it is quite easy to set up PAM support in ejabberd, PAM itself introduces some security
issues:
• To perform PAM authentication ejabberd uses external C-program called epam. By de-
fault, it is located in /var/lib/ejabberd/priv/bin/ directory. You have to set it root
on execution in the case when your PAM module requires root privileges (pam unix.so for
example). Also you have to grant access for ejabberd to this file and remove all other
permissions from it. Execute with root privileges:
chown root:ejabberd /var/lib/ejabberd/priv/bin/epam

chmod 4750 /var/lib/ejabberd/priv/bin/epam
• Make sure you have the latest version of PAM installed on your system. Some old versions
of PAM modules cause memory leaks. If you are not able to use the latest version, you
can kill(1) epam process periodically to reduce its memory consumption: ejabberd will
restart this process immediately.
• epam program tries to turn off delays on authentication failures. However, some PAM
modules ignore this behavior and rely on their own configuration options. You can create a
configuration file ejabberd.pam. This example shows how to turn off delays in pam unix.so
module:
#%PAM-1.0
auth sufficient pam_unix.so likeauth nullok nodelay
account sufficient pam_unix.so
That is not a ready to use configuration file: you must use it as a hint when building your
own PAM configuration instead. Note that if you want to disable delays on authentication
failures in the PAM configuration file, you have to restrict access to this file, so a malicious
user can’t use your configuration to perform brute-force attacks.
• You may want to allow login access only for certain users. pam listfile.so module
provides such functionality.
3.1.5 Access Rules
ACL Definition
Access control in ejabberd is performed via Access Control Lists (ACLs). The declarations of
ACLs in the configuration file have the following syntax:
{acl, <aclname>, {<acltype>, ...}}.
<acltype> can be one of the following:
all Matches all JIDs. Example:
{acl, all, all}.
{user, <username>} Matches the user with the name <username> at the first virtual host.
Example:
{acl, admin, {user, "yozhik"}}.
{user, <username>, <server>} Matches the user with the JID <username>@<server> and
any resource. Example:
{acl, admin, {user, "yozhik", "example.org"}}.
{server, <server>} Matches any JID from server <server>. Example:
{acl, exampleorg, {server, "example.org"}}.
{shared group, <groupname>} Matches any member of a Shared Roster Group with name
<groupname> in the virtual host. Example:
{acl, techgroupmembers, {shared_group, "techteam"}}.
{shared group, <groupname>, <server>} Matches any member of a Shared Roster Group
with name <groupname> in the virtual host <server>. Example:
{acl, techgroupmembers, {shared_group, "techteam", "example.org"}}.
{user regexp, <regexp>} Matches any local user with a name that matches <regexp> on local
virtual hosts. Example:
{acl, tests, {user_regexp, "^test[0-9]*$"}}.
{user regexp, <regexp>, <server>} Matches any user with a name that matches <regexp>
at server <server>. Example:
{acl, tests, {user_regexp, "^test", "example.org"}}.
{server regexp, <regexp>} Matches any JID from the server that matches <regexp>. Exam-
ple:
{acl, icq, {server_regexp, "^icq\\."}}.
{node regexp, <user regexp>, <server regexp>} Matches any user with a name that matches
<user regexp> at any server that matches <server regexp>. Example:
{acl, yohzik, {node_regexp, "^yohzik$", "^example.(com|org)$"}}.
{user glob, <glob>}
{user glob, <glob>, <server>}
{server glob, <glob>}
{node glob, <user glob>, <server glob>} This is the same as above. However, it uses shell
glob patterns instead of regexp. These patterns can have the following special characters:
* matches any string including the null string.

? matches any single character.
[...] matches any of the enclosed characters. Character ranges are specified by a pair of
characters separated by a ‘-’. If the first character after ‘[’ is a ‘!’, any character
not enclosed is matched.
The following ACLs are pre-defined:
all Matches any JID.
none Matches no JID.

Access Rights
An entry allowing or denying access to different services looks similar to this:
{access, <accessname>, [{allow, <aclname>},

{deny, <aclname>},
...
]}.
When a JID is checked to have access to <accessname>, the server sequentially checks if that
JID matches any of the ACLs that are named in the second elements of the tuples in the list. If
it matches, the first element of the first matched tuple is returned, otherwise the value ‘deny’ is
returned.
Example:
{access, configure, [{allow, admin}]}.

{access, something, [{deny, badmans},
{allow, all}]}.
The following access rules are pre-defined:
all Always returns the value ‘allow’.
none Always returns the value ‘deny’.
Limiting Opened Sessions with ACL
The special access max user sessions specifies the maximum number of sessions (authenticated
connections) per user. If a user tries to open more sessions by using different resources, the
first opened session will be disconnected. The error session replaced will be sent to the
disconnected session. The value for this option can be either a number, or infinity. The
default value is infinity.
The syntax is:
{access, max_user_sessions, [{<maxnumber>, <aclname>},

...
]}.
Examples:
• To limit the number of sessions per user to 10 for all users:
{access, max_user_sessions, [{10, all}]}.

Several connections to a remote Jabber server with ACL
The special access max s2s connections specifies how many simultaneus S2S connections can
be established to a specific remote Jabber server. The default value is 1. There’s also available
the access max s2s connections per node.
The syntax is:
{access, max_s2s_connections, [{<maxnumber>, <aclname>},

...
]}.
Examples:
• Allow up to 3 connections with each remote server:
{access, max_s2s_connections, [{3, all}]}.
3.1.6 Shapers
Shapers enable you to limit connection traffic. The syntax of shapers is like this:
{shaper, <shapername>, <kind>}.
Currently only one kind of shaper called maxrate is available. It has the following syntax:
{maxrate, <rate>}
where <rate> stands for the maximum allowed incoming rate in bytes per second. When a
connection exceeds this limit, ejabberd stops reading from the socket until the average rate is
again below the allowed maximum.
Examples:
• To define a shaper named ‘normal’ with traffic speed limited to 1,000 bytes/second:
{shaper, normal, {maxrate, 1000}}.
• To define a shaper named ‘fast’ with traffic speed limited to 50,000 bytes/second:
{shaper, fast, {maxrate, 50000}}.

3.2 Database and LDAP Configuration 35
3.1.7 Default Language
The option language defines the default language of server strings that can be seen by Jabber
clients. If a Jabber client do not support xml:lang, the specified language is used. The default
value is en. In order to take effect there must be a translation file <language>.msg in ejabberd’s
msgs directory.
For example, to set Russian as default language:
{language, "ru"}.
3.2 Database and LDAP Configuration
ejabberd uses its internal Mnesia database by default. However, it is possible to use a relational
database or an LDAP server to store persistent, long-living data. ejabberd is very flexible:
you can configure different authentication methods for different virtual hosts, you can configure
different authentication mechanisms for the same virtual host (fallback), you can set different
storage systems for modules, and so forth.
The following databases are supported by ejabberd:
• Microsoft SQL Server20
• Mnesia21
• MySQL22
• Any ODBC compatible database23
• PostgreSQL24
The following LDAP servers are tested with ejabberd:
• Active Directory25 (see section 3.2.5)
• OpenLDAP26
• Normally any LDAP compatible server should work; inform us about your success with a
not-listed server so that we can list it here.
20 http://www.microsoft.com/sql/
21 http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/index.html
22 http://www.mysql.com/
23 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open Database Connectivity
24 http://www.postgresql.org/
25 http://www.microsoft.com/activedirectory/
26 http://www.openldap.org/
Important note about virtual hosting: if you define several domains in ejabberd.cfg (see sec-
tion 3.1.1), you probably want that each virtual host uses a different configuration of database,
authentication and storage, so that usernames do not conflict and mix between different vir-
tual hosts. For that purpose, the options described in the next sections must be set inside a
host config for each vhost (see section 3.1.2). For example:
{host_config, "public.example.org", [
{odbc_server, {pgsql, "localhost", "database-public-example-org", "ejabberd", "password"}},
{auth_method, [odbc]}
]}.
3.2.1 MySQL
Although this section will describe ejabberd’s configuration when you want to use the native
MySQL driver, it does not describe MySQL’s installation and database creation. Check the
MySQL documentation and the tutorial Using ejabberd with MySQL native driver27 for infor-
mation regarding these topics. Note that the tutorial contains information about ejabberd’s
configuration which is duplicate to this section.
Moreover, the file mysql.sql in the directory src/odbc might be interesting for you. This file
contains the ejabberd schema for MySQL. At the end of the file you can find information to
update your database schema.
Driver Compilation
You can skip this step if you installed ejabberd using a binary installer or if the binary packages
of ejabberd you are using include support for MySQL.
1. First, install the Erlang MySQL library28 . Make sure the compiled files are in your Erlang
path; you can put them for example in the same directory as your ejabberd .beam files.
2. Then, configure and install ejabberd with ODBC support enabled (this is also needed for
native MySQL support!). This can be done, by using next commands:
./configure --enable-odbc && make install
Database Connection
The actual database access is defined in the option odbc server. Its value is used to define if
we want to use ODBC, or one of the two native interface available, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
To use the native MySQL interface, you can pass a tuple of the following form as parameter:
27 http://support.process-one.net/doc/display/MESSENGER/Using+ejabberd+with+MySQL+native+driver
28 http://support.process-one.net/doc/display/CONTRIBS/Yxa
{mysql, "Server", "Database", "Username", "Password"}
mysql is a keyword that should be kept as is. For example:
{odbc_server, {mysql, "localhost", "test", "root", "password"}}.
Optionally, it is possible to define the MySQL port to use. This option is only useful, in very rare
cases, when you are not running MySQL with the default port setting. The mysql parameter
can thus take the following form:
{mysql, "Server", Port, "Database", "Username", "Password"}
The Port value should be an integer, without quotes. For example:
{odbc_server, {mysql, "localhost", Port, "test", "root", "password"}}.
By default ejabberd opens 10 connections to the database for each virtual host. Use this option
to modify the value:
{odbc_pool_size, 10}.
You can configure an interval to make a dummy SQL request to keep alive the connections to
the database. The default value is ’undefined’, so no keepalive requests are made. Specify in
seconds: for example 28800 means 8 hours.
{odbc_keepalive_interval, undefined}.
If the connection to the database fails, ejabberd waits 30 seconds before retrying. You can
modify this interval with this option:
{odbc_start_interval, 30}.
Authentication
The option value name may be misleading, as the auth method name is used for access to a
relational database through ODBC, as well as through the native MySQL interface. Anyway,
the first configuration step is to define the odbc auth method. For example:
{auth_method, [odbc]}.
Storage
MySQL also can be used to store information into from several ejabberd modules. See sec-
tion 3.3.1 to see which modules have a version with the ‘ odbc’. This suffix indicates that the
module can be used with relational databases like MySQL. To enable storage to your database,
just make sure that your database is running well (see previous sections), and replace the suffix-
less or ldap module variant with the odbc module variant. Keep in mind that you cannot have
several variants of the same module loaded!
3.2.2 Microsoft SQL Server
Although this section will describe ejabberd’s configuration when you want to use Microsoft SQL
Server, it does not describe Microsoft SQL Server’s installation and database creation. Check
the MySQL documentation and the tutorial Using ejabberd with MySQL native driver29 for
information regarding these topics. Note that the tutorial contains information about ejabberd’s
Moreover, the file mssql.sql in the directory src/odbc might be interesting for you. This file
contains the ejabberd schema for Microsoft SQL Server. At the end of the file you can find
information to update your database schema.
Driver Compilation
of ejabberd you are using include support for ODBC.
If you want to use Microsoft SQL Server with ODBC, you need to configure, compile and install
ejabberd with support for ODBC and Microsoft SQL Server enabled. This can be done, by
using next commands:
./configure --enable-odbc --enable-mssql && make install
Database Connection
Authentication
The configuration of Microsoft SQL Server is the same as the configuration of ODBC compatible
servers (see section 3.2.4).
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server also can be used to store information into from several ejabberd modules.
See section 3.3.1 to see which modules have a version with the ‘ odbc’. This suffix indicates that
the module can be used with relational databases like Microsoft SQL Server. To enable storage
to your database, just make sure that your database is running well (see previous sections), and
replace the suffix-less or ldap module variant with the odbc module variant. Keep in mind that
you cannot have several variants of the same module loaded!
3.2.3 PostgreSQL
Although this section will describe ejabberd’s configuration when you want to use the native
PostgreSQL driver, it does not describe PostgreSQL’s installation and database creation. Check
the PostgreSQL documentation and the tutorial Using ejabberd with MySQL native driver30 for
information regarding these topics. Note that the tutorial contains information about ejabberd’s
Also the file pg.sql in the directory src/odbc might be interesting for you. This file contains the
ejabberd schema for PostgreSQL. At the end of the file you can find information to update your
database schema.
Driver Compilation
of ejabberd you are using include support for PostgreSQL.
1. First, install the Erlang pgsql library from ejabberd-modules SVN repository31 . Make sure
the compiled files are in your Erlang path; you can put them for example in the same
directory as your ejabberd .beam files.
2. Then, configure, compile and install ejabberd with ODBC support enabled (this is also
needed for native PostgreSQL support!). This can be done, by using next commands:

31 http://www.ejabberd.im/ejabberd-modules/
Database Connection
The actual database access is defined in the option odbc server. Its value is used to define if
To use the native PostgreSQL interface, you can pass a tuple of the following form as parameter:
{pgsql, "Server", "Database", "Username", "Password"}
pgsql is a keyword that should be kept as is. For example:
{odbc_server, {pgsql, "localhost", "database", "ejabberd", "password"}}.
Optionally, it is possible to define the PostgreSQL port to use. This option is only useful, in
very rare cases, when you are not running PostgreSQL with the default port setting. The pgsql
parameter can thus take the following form:
{pgsql, "Server", Port, "Database", "Username", "Password"}
The Port value should be an integer, without quotes. For example:
{odbc_server, {pgsql, "localhost", 5432, "database", "ejabberd", "password"}}.
Authentication
The option value name may be misleading, as the auth method name is used for access to a
relational database through ODBC, as well as through the native PostgreSQL interface. Anyway,
the first configuration step is to define the odbc auth method. For example:
Storage
PostgreSQL also can be used to store information into from several ejabberd modules. See
section 3.3.1 to see which modules have a version with the ‘ odbc’. This suffix indicates that
the module can be used with relational databases like PostgreSQL. To enable storage to your
database, just make sure that your database is running well (see previous sections), and replace
the suffix-less or ldap module variant with the odbc module variant. Keep in mind that you
cannot have several variants of the same module loaded!
3.2.4 ODBC Compatible
Although this section will describe ejabberd’s configuration when you want to use the ODBC
driver, it does not describe the installation and database creation of your database. Check the
documentation of your database. The tutorial Using ejabberd with MySQL native driver32 also
can help you. Note that the tutorial contains information about ejabberd’s configuration which
is duplicate to this section.
Driver Compilation
of ejabberd you are using include support for ODBC.
1. First, install the Erlang MySQL library33 . Make sure the compiled files are in your Erlang
path; you can put them for example in the same directory as your ejabberd .beam files.
2. Then, configure, compile and install ejabberd with ODBC support enabled. This can be
done, by using next commands:
Database Connection
The actual database access is defined in the option odbc server. Its value is used to defined if
To use a relational database through ODBC, you can pass the ODBC connection string as
odbc server parameter. For example:
{odbc_server, "DSN=database;UID=ejabberd;PWD=password"}.
33 http://support.process-one.net/doc/display/CONTRIBS/Yxa
Authentication
The first configuration step is to define the odbc auth method. For example:
Storage
An ODBC compatible database also can be used to store information into from several ejabberd
modules. See section 3.3.1 to see which modules have a version with the ‘ odbc’. This suffix
indicates that the module can be used with ODBC compatible relational databases. To enable
storage to your database, just make sure that your database is running well (see previous sec-
tions), and replace the suffix-less or ldap module variant with the odbc module variant. Keep in
mind that you cannot have several variants of the same module loaded!
3.2.5 LDAP
ejabberd has built-in LDAP support. You can authenticate users against LDAP server and use
LDAP directory as vCard storage. Shared rosters are not supported yet.
Note that ejabberd treats LDAP as a read-only storage: it is possible to consult data, but not
possible to create accounts, change password or edit vCard that is stored in LDAP.
Connection
Parameters:
ldap servers List of IP addresses or DNS names of your LDAP servers. This option is required.
ldap port Port to connect to your LDAP server. The initial default value is 389, so it is used
when nothing is set into the configuration file. If you configure a value, it is stored in
ejabberd’s database. Then, if you remove that value from the configuration file, the value
previously stored in the database will be used instead of the default 389.
ldap rootdn Bind DN. The default value is "" which means ‘anonymous connection’.
ldap password Bind password. The default value is "".
Example:
{auth_method, ldap}.
{ldap_servers, ["ldap.example.org"]}.
{ldap_port, 389}.
{ldap_rootdn, "cn=Manager,dc=domain,dc=org"}.
{ldap_password, "secret"}.
Note that current LDAP implementation does not support SSL secured communication and
SASL authentication.
Authentication
You can authenticate users against an LDAP directory. Available options are:
ldap base LDAP base directory which stores users accounts. This option is required.
ldap uids LDAP attribute which holds a list of attributes to use as alternatives for getting the
JID. The value is of the form: [{ldap uidattr}] or [{ldap uidattr, ldap uidattr format}].
You can use as many comma separated tuples {ldap uidattr, ldap uidattr format}
that is needed. The default value is [{"uid", "%u"}]. The defaut ldap uidattr format
is "%u". The values for ldap uidattr and ldap uidattr format are described as follow:
ldap uidattr LDAP attribute which holds the user’s part of a JID. The default value is
"uid".
ldap uidattr format Format of the ldap uidattr variable. The format must contain
one and only one pattern variable "%u" which will be replaced by the user’s part of a
JID. For example, "%[email protected]". The default value is "%u".
ldap filter RFC 225434 LDAP filter. The default is none. Example: "(&(objectClass=shadowAccount)(memberOf=Ja
Users))". Please, do not forget to close brackets and do not use superfluous whitespaces.
Also you must not use ldap uidattr attribute in filter because this attribute will be sub-
stituted in LDAP filter automatically.
ldap local filter If you can’t use ldap filter due to performance reasons (the LDAP server
has many users registered), you can use this local filter. The local filter checks an attribute
in ejabberd, not in LDAP, so this limits the load on the LDAP directory. The default filter
is: undefined. Example values:
{ldap_local_filter, {notequal, {"accountStatus",["disabled"]}}}.

{ldap_local_filter, {equal, {"accountStatus",["enabled"]}}}.
{ldap_local_filter, undefined}.
34 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2254.html
Examples
Common example Let’s say ldap.example.org is the name of our LDAP server. We have
users with their passwords in "ou=Users,dc=example,dc=org" directory. Also we have address-
book, which contains users emails and their additional infos in "ou=AddressBook,dc=example,dc=org"
directory. Corresponding authentication section should looks like this:
%% Authentication method
%% DNS name of our LDAP server
%% Bind to LDAP server as "cn=Manager,dc=example,dc=org" with password "secret"
{ldap_rootdn, "cn=Manager,dc=example,dc=org"}.
{ldap_password, "secret"}.
%% Define the user’s base
{ldap_base, "ou=Users,dc=example,dc=org"}.
%% We want to authorize users from ’shadowAccount’ object class only
{ldap_filter, "(objectClass=shadowAccount)"}.
Now we want to use users LDAP-info as their vCards. We have four attributes defined in our
LDAP schema: "mail" — email address, "givenName" — first name, "sn" — second name,
"birthDay" — birthday. Also we want users to search each other. Let’s see how we can set it
up:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_vcard_ldap,
[
%% We use the same server and port, but want to bind anonymously because
%% our LDAP server accepts anonymous requests to
%% "ou=AddressBook,dc=example,dc=org" subtree.
{ldap_rootdn, ""},
{ldap_password, ""},
%% define the addressbook’s base
{ldap_base, "ou=AddressBook,dc=example,dc=org"},
%% uidattr: user’s part of JID is located in the "mail" attribute
%% uidattr_format: common format for our emails
{ldap_uids, [{"mail", "%[email protected]"}]},
%% We have to define empty filter here, because entries in addressbook does not
%% belong to shadowAccount object class
{ldap_filter, ""},
%% Now we want to define vCard pattern
{ldap_vcard_map,
[{"NICKNAME", "%u", []}, % just use user’s part of JID as his nickname
{"GIVEN", "%s", ["givenName"]},
{"FAMILY", "%s", ["sn"]},
{"FN", "%s, %s", ["sn", "givenName"]}, % example: "Smith, John"

{"EMAIL", "%s", ["mail"]},
{"BDAY", "%s", ["birthDay"]}]},
%% Search form
{ldap_search_fields,
[{"User", "%u"},
{"Name", "givenName"},
{"Family Name", "sn"},
{"Email", "mail"},
{"Birthday", "birthDay"}]},
%% vCard fields to be reported
%% Note that JID is always returned with search results
{ldap_search_reported,
[{"Full Name", "FN"},
{"Nickname", "NICKNAME"},
{"Birthday", "BDAY"}]}
]},
...
]}.
Note that mod vcard ldap module checks for the existence of the user before searching in his
information in LDAP.
Active Directory Active Directory is just an LDAP-server with predefined attributes. A

sample configuration is shown below:
{ldap_servers, ["office.org"]}. % List of LDAP servers
{ldap_base, "DC=office,DC=org"}. % Search base of LDAP directory
{ldap_rootdn, "CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=office,DC=org"}. % LDAP manager
{ldap_password, "*******"}. % Password to LDAP manager
{ldap_uids, [{"sAMAccountName"}]}.
{ldap_filter, "(memberOf=*)"}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_vcard_ldap,
[{ldap_vcard_map,
[{"NICKNAME", "%u", []},
{"GIVEN", "%s", ["givenName"]},
{"MIDDLE", "%s", ["initials"]},
{"FAMILY", "%s", ["sn"]},
{"FN", "%s", ["displayName"]},
{"EMAIL", "%s", ["mail"]},
{"ORGNAME", "%s", ["company"]},
{"ORGUNIT", "%s", ["department"]},
{"CTRY", "%s", ["c"]},

{"LOCALITY", "%s", ["l"]},
{"STREET", "%s", ["streetAddress"]},
{"REGION", "%s", ["st"]},
{"PCODE", "%s", ["postalCode"]},
{"TITLE", "%s", ["title"]},
{"URL", "%s", ["wWWHomePage"]},
{"DESC", "%s", ["description"]},
{"TEL", "%s", ["telephoneNumber"]}]},
[{"User", "%u"},
{"Email", "mail"},
{"Company", "company"},
{"Department", "department"},
{"Role", "title"},
{"Description", "description"},
{"Phone", "telephoneNumber"}]},
{"Email", "EMAIL"}]}
]},
...
]}.
3.3 Modules Configuration
The option modules defines the list of modules that will be loaded after ejabberd’s startup.
Each entry in the list is a tuple in which the first element is the name of a module and the
second is a list of options for that module.
Examples:
• In this example only the module mod echo is loaded and no module options are specified
between the square brackets:
{modules,
[
{mod_echo, []}
]}.
• In the second example the modules mod echo, mod time, and mod version are loaded
without options. Remark that, besides the last entry, all entries end with a comma:
{modules,
3.3 Modules Configuration 47
[
{mod_echo, []},
{mod_time, []},
{mod_version, []}
]}.
3.3.1 Modules Overview
The following table lists all modules included in ejabberd.
Module Feature Dependencies

mod adhoc Ad-Hoc Commands (XEP-005035 )
mod announce Manage announcements recommends mod adhoc
mod caps Entity Capabilities (XEP-011536 )
mod configure Server configuration using Ad-Hoc mod adhoc
mod disco Service Discovery (XEP-003037 )
mod echo Echoes Jabber packets
mod irc IRC transport
mod last Last Activity (XEP-001238 )
mod last odbc Last Activity (XEP-001239 ) supported DB (*)
mod muc Multi-User Chat (XEP-004540 )
mod muc log Multi-User Chat room logging mod muc
mod offline Offline message storage (XEP-016041 )
mod offline odbc Offline message storage (XEP-016042 ) supported DB (*)
mod privacy Blocking Communication (XMPP IM)
mod privacy odbc Blocking Communication (XMPP IM) supported DB (*)
mod private Private XML Storage (XEP-004943 )
mod private odbc Private XML Storage (XEP-004944 ) supported DB (*)
mod proxy65 SOCKS5 Bytestreams (XEP-006545 )
mod pubsub Pub-Sub (XEP-006046 ), PEP (XEP-016347 ) mod caps
mod register In-Band Registration (XEP-007748 )
mod roster Roster management (XMPP IM)
mod roster odbc Roster management (XMPP IM) supported DB (*)
mod service log Copy user messages to logger service
mod shared roster Shared roster management mod roster or
mod roster odbc
mod stats Statistics Gathering (XEP-003949 )
mod time Entity Time (XEP-009050 )
mod vcard vcard-temp (XEP-005451 )
mod vcard ldap vcard-temp (XEP-005452 ) LDAP server
mod vcard odbc vcard-temp (XEP-005453 ) supported DB (*)
mod version Software Version (XEP-009254 )
• (*) This module requires a supported database. For a list of supported databases, see
section 3.2.
You can see which database backend each module needs by looking at the suffix:
• No suffix, this means that the modules uses Erlang’s built-in database Mnesia as backend.
• ‘ odbc’, this means that the module needs a supported database (see 3.2) as backend.
• ‘ ldap’, this means that the module needs an LDAP server as backend.
If you want to, it is possible to use a relational database to store pieces of information. You can
do this by changing the module name to a name with an odbc suffix in ejabberd config file.
You can use a relational database for the following data:
• Last connection date and time: Use mod last odbc instead of mod last.
• Offline messages: Use mod offline odbc instead of mod offline.
• Rosters: Use mod roster odbc instead of mod roster.
• Users’ VCARD: Use mod vcard odbc instead of mod vcard.
• Private XML storage: Use mod private odbc instead of mod private.
• User rules for blocking communications: Use mod privacy odbc instead of mod privacy.
You can find more contributed modules55 on the ejabberd website. Please remember that these
contributions might not work or that they can contain severe bugs and security leaks. Therefore,
use them at your own risk!
3.3.2 Common Options
The following options are used by many modules. Therefore, they are described in this separate
section.
iqdisc
Many modules define handlers for processing IQ queries of different namespaces to this server
or to a user (e. g. to example.org or to [email protected]). This option defines processing
discipline for these queries. Possible values are:
no queue All queries of a namespace with this processing discipline are processed immediately.
This also means that no other packets can be processed until this one has been completely
processed. Hence this discipline is not recommended if the processing of a query can take
a relatively long time.
one queue In this case a separate queue is created for the processing of IQ queries of a namespace
with this discipline. In addition, the processing of this queue is done in parallel with that
of other packets. This discipline is most recommended.
55 http://www.ejabberd.im/contributions
{queues, N} N separate queues are created to process the queries. The queries are thus process
in parallel, but in a controlled way.
parallel For every packet with this discipline a separate Erlang process is spawned. Conse-
quently, all these packets are processed in parallel. Although spawning of Erlang process
has a relatively low cost, this can break the server’s normal work, because the Erlang
emulator has a limit on the number of processes (32000 by default).
Example:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_time, [{iqdisc, no_queue}]},
...
]}.
host
This option defines the Jabber ID of a service provided by an ejabberd module. The keyword
”@HOST@” is replaced at start time with the real virtual host string.
This example configures the echo module to provide its echoing service in the Jabber ID mirror.example.org:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_echo, [{host, "mirror.example.org"}]},
...
]}.
However, if there are several virtual hosts and this module is enabled in all of them, the
”@HOST@” keyword must be used:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_echo, [{host, "mirror.@HOST@"}]},
...
]}.
3.3.3 mod announce
This module enables configured users to broadcast announcements and to set the message of
the day (MOTD). Configured users can perform these actions with a Jabber client either using
Ad-hoc commands or sending messages to specific JIDs.
The Ad-hoc commands are listed in the Server Discovery. For this feature to work, mod adhoc
must be enabled.
The specific JIDs where messages can be sent are listed bellow. The first JID in each entry will
apply only to the specified virtual host example.org, while the JID between brackets will apply
to all virtual hosts in ejabberd.
example.org/announce/all (example.org/announce/all-hosts/all) The message is sent to

all registered users. If the user is online and connected to several resources, only the resource
with the highest priority will receive the message. If the registered user is not connected,
the message will be stored offline in assumption that offline storage (see section 3.3.12) is
enabled.
example.org/announce/online (example.org/announce/all-hosts/online) The message is

sent to all connected users. If the user is online and connected to several resources, all re-
sources will receive the message.
example.org/announce/motd (example.org/announce/all-hosts/motd) The message is set

as the message of the day (MOTD) and is sent to users when they login. In addition the
message is sent to all connected users (similar to announce/online).
example.org/announce/motd/update (example.org/announce/all-hosts/motd/update) The

message is set as message of the day (MOTD) and is sent to users when they login. The
message is not sent to any currently connected user.
example.org/announce/motd/delete (example.org/announce/all-hosts/motd/delete) Any

message sent to this JID removes the existing message of the day (MOTD).
Options:
access This option specifies who is allowed to send announcements and to set the message of
the day (by default, nobody is able to send such messages).
Examples:
• Only administrators can send announcements:
{access, announce, [{allow, admins}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_adhoc, []},
{mod_announce, [{access, announce}]},
...
]}.
• Administrators as well as the direction can send announcements:

{acl, direction, {user, "big_boss", "example.org"}}.

{acl, direction, {user, "assistant", "example.org"}}.
{acl, admins, {user, "admin", "example.org"}}.
{access, announce, [{allow, admins},

{allow, direction}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_adhoc, []},
{mod_announce, [{access, announce}]},
...
]}.
Note that mod announce can be resource intensive on large deployments as it can broadcast lot of
messages. This module should be disabled for instances of ejabberd with hundreds of thousands
users.
3.3.4 mod disco
This module adds support for Service Discovery (XEP-003056 ). With this module enabled,
services on your server can be discovered by Jabber clients. Note that ejabberd has no mod-
ules with support for the superseded Jabber Browsing (XEP-001157 ) and Agent Information
(XEP-009458 ). Accordingly, Jabber clients need to have support for the newer Service Discovery
protocol if you want them be able to discover the services you offer.
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Service Discovery (http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#items
and http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info) IQ queries (see section 3.3.2).
extra domains With this option, extra domains can be added to the Service Discovery item list.
Examples:
• To serve a link to the Jabber User Directory on jabber.org:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_disco, [{extra_domains, ["users.jabber.org"]}]},
...
]}.
• To serve a link to the transports on another server:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_disco, [{extra_domains, ["icq.example.com",
"msn.example.com"]}]},
...
]}.
• To serve a link to a few friendly servers:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_disco, [{extra_domains, ["example.org",
"example.com"]}]},
...
]}.
3.3.5 mod echo
This module simply echoes any Jabber packet back to the sender. This mirror can be of interest
for ejabberd and Jabber client debugging.
Options:
host This option defines the Jabber ID of the service. If the host option is not specified, the
Jabber ID will be the hostname of the virtual host with the prefix ‘echo.’. The keyword
”@HOST@” is replaced at start time with the real virtual host name.
Example: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most beautiful of them all?
{modules,
[
...
{mod_echo, [{host, "mirror.example.org"}]},
...
]}.
3.3.6 mod http bind
This module implements XMPP over Bosh (formerly known as HTTP Binding) as defined in
XEP-012459 and XEP-020660 . It extends ejabberd’s built in HTTP service with a configurable
resource at which this service will be hosted.
To use HTTP-Binding, enable the module:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_http_bind, []},
...
]}.
and add http_bind in the HTTP service. For example:
{listen,
[
...
http_bind,
http_poll,
web_admin
]
},
...
]}.
With this configuration, the module will serve the requests sent to http://example.org:5280/http-bind/
Remember that this page is not designed to be used by web browsers, it is used by Jabber clients
that support XMPP over Bosh.
If you want to set the service in a different URI path or use a different module, you can configure
it manually using the option request_handlers. For example:
{listen,
[
...
{request_handlers, [{["http-bind"], mod_http_bind}]},
http_poll,
web_admin
]
},
...
]}.
The maximum inactivity period is by default 30 seconds. This can be configured with the module
option max inactivity. For example, to set 50 seconds:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_http_bind, [ {max_inactivity, 50} ]},
...
]}.
3.3.7 mod http fileserver
This simple module serves files from the local disk over HTTP.
Options:
docroot Directory to serve the files.

accesslog File to log accesses using an Apache-like format. No log will be recorded if this
option is not specified.
This example configuration will serve the files from the local directory /var/www in the address
http://example.org:5280/pub/archive/. To use this module you must enable it:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_http_fileserver, [
{docroot, "/var/www"},
{accesslog, "/var/log/ejabberd/access.log"}
]
},
...
]}.
And define it as a handler in the HTTP service:
{listen,
[
...
...
{request_handlers, [
...
{["pub", "archive"], mod_http_fileserver},
...
]
},
...
]
},
...
]}.
3.3.8 mod irc
This module is an IRC transport that can be used to join channels on IRC servers.
End user information:
• A Jabber client with ‘groupchat 1.0’ support or Multi-User Chat support (XEP-004561 ) is
necessary to join IRC channels.
• An IRC channel can be joined in nearly the same way as joining a Jabber Multi-User Chat
room. The difference is that the room name will be ‘channel%irc.example.org’ in case
irc.example.org is the IRC server hosting ‘channel’. And of course the host should point
to the IRC transport instead of the Multi-User Chat service.
• You can register your nickame by sending ‘IDENTIFY password’ to
[email protected].
• Entering your password is possible by sending ‘LOGIN nick password’
to [email protected].
• When using a popular Jabber server, it can occur that no connection can be achieved with
some IRC servers because they limit the number of conections from one IP.
Options:
Jabber ID will be the hostname of the virtual host with the prefix ‘irc.’. The keyword
access This option can be used to specify who may use the IRC transport (default value: all).
default encoding Set the default IRC encoding (default value: "koi8-r").
Examples:
• In the first example, the IRC transport is available on (all) your virtual host(s) with the
prefix ‘irc.’. Furthermore, anyone is able to use the transport. The default encoding is
set to ”iso8859-15”.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_irc, [{access, all}, {default_encoding, "iso8859-15"}]},
...
]}.
• In next example the IRC transport is available with JIDs with prefix irc-t.net. Moreover,
the transport is only accessible to two users of example.org, and any user of example.com:
{acl, paying_customers, {user, "customer1", "example.org"}}.

{acl, paying_customers, {server, "example.com"}}.
{access, irc_users, [{allow, paying_customers}, {deny, all}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_irc, [{access, irc_users},
{host, "irc.example.net"}]},
...
]}.
3.3.9 mod last
This module adds support for Last Activity (XEP-001262 ). It can be used to discover when a
disconnected user last accessed the server, to know when a connected user was last active on the
server, or to query the uptime of the ejabberd server.
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Last activity (jabber:iq:last) IQ queries
(see section 3.3.2).
3.3.10 mod muc
This module provides a Multi-User Chat (XEP-004563 ) service. Users can discover existing
rooms, join or create them. Occupants of a room can chat in public or have private chats.
Some of the features of Multi-User Chat:
• Sending public and private messages to room occupants.
• Inviting other users to a room.
• Setting a room subject.
• Creating password protected rooms.
• Kicking and banning occupants.
The MUC service allows any Jabber ID to register a nickname, so nobody else can use that
nickname in any room in the MUC service. To register a nickname, open the Service Discovery
in your Jabber client and register in the MUC service.
This module supports clustering and load balancing. One module can be started per cluster node.
Rooms are distributed at creation time on all available MUC module instances. The multi-user
chat module is clustered but the rooms themselves are not clustered nor fault-tolerant: if the
node managing a set of rooms goes down, the rooms disappear and they will be recreated on an
available node on first connection attempt.
Module options:
Jabber ID will be the hostname of the virtual host with the prefix ‘conference.’. The
keyword ”@HOST@” is replaced at start time with the real virtual host name.
access You can specify who is allowed to use the Multi-User Chat service. By default everyone
is allowed to use it.
access create To configure who is allowed to create new rooms at the Multi-User Chat service,
this option can be used. By default everybody is allowed to create rooms.
access persistent To configure who is allowed to modify the ’persistent’ room option. By
default everybody is allowed to modify that option.
access admin This option specifies who is allowed to administrate the Multi-User Chat service.
The default value is none, which means that only the room creator can administer his
room. The administrators can send a normal message to the service JID, and it will be
shown in all active rooms as a service message. The administrators can send a groupchat
message to the JID of an active room, and the message will be shown in the room as a
service message.
history size A small history of the current discussion is sent to users when they enter the
room. With this option you can define the number of history messages to keep and send to
users joining the room. The value is an integer. Setting the value to 0 disables the history
feature and, as a result, nothing is kept in memory. The default value is 20. This value is
global and thus affects all rooms on the service.
max users This option defines at the service level, the maximum number of users allowed per
room. It can be lowered in each room configuration but cannot be increased in individual
room configuration. The default value is 200.
max users admin threshold This option defines the number of service admins or room owners
allowed to enter the room when the maximum number of allowed occupants was reached.
The default limit is 5.
max user conferences This option defines the maximum number of rooms that any given user
can join. The default value is 10. This option is used to prevent possible abuses. Note that
this is a soft limit: some users can sometimes join more conferences in cluster configurations.
min message interval This option defines the minimum interval between two messages send
by an occupant in seconds. This option is global and valid for all rooms. A decimal value
can be used. When this option is not defined, message rate is not limited. This feature
can be used to protect a MUC service from occupant abuses and limit number of messages
that will be broadcasted by the service. A good value for this minimum message interval
is 0.4 second. If an occupant tries to send messages faster, an error is send back explaining
that the message has been discarded and describing the reason why the message is not
acceptable.
min presence interval This option defines the minimum of time between presence changes
coming from a given occupant in seconds. This option is global and valid for all rooms.
A decimal value can be used. When this option is not defined, no restriction is applied.
This option can be used to protect a MUC service for occupants abuses. If an occupant
tries to change its presence more often than the specified interval, the presence is cached
by ejabberd and only the last presence is broadcasted to all occupants in the room after
expiration of the interval delay. Intermediate presence packets are silently discarded. A
good value for this option is 4 seconds.
default room options This module option allows to define the desired default room options.
Note that the creator of a room can modify the options of his room at any time using a
Jabber client with MUC capability. The available room options and the default values are:
{allow change subj, true} Allow occupants to change the subject.

{allow private messages, true} Occupants can send private messages to other occu-
pants.
{allow query users, true} Occupants can send IQ queries to other occupants.
{allow user invites, false} Allow occupants to send invitations.
{allow visitor nickchange, true} Allow visitors to change nickname.
{allow visitor status, true} Allow visitors to send status text in presence updates. If
disallowed, the status text is stripped before broadcasting the presence update to all
the room occupants.
{anonymous, true} The room is anonymous: occupants don’t see the real JIDs of other
occupants. Note that the room moderators can always see the real JIDs of the occu-
pants.
{logging, false} The public messages are logged using mod muc log.
{max users, 200} Maximum number of occupants in the room.
{members by default, true} The occupants that enter the room are participants by de-
fault, so they have ’voice’.
{members only, false} Only members of the room can enter.
{moderated, true} Only occupants with ’voice’ can send public messages.
{password, ""} Password of the room. You may want to enable the next option too.
{password protected, false} The password is required to enter the room.
{persistent, false} The room persists even if the last participant leaves.
{public, true} The room is public in the list of the MUC service, so it can be discovered.
{public list, true} The list of participants is public, without requiring to enter the
room.
{title, ""} A human-readable title of the room.
All of those room options can be set to true or false, except password and title which
are strings, and max users that is integer.
Examples:
• In the first example everyone is allowed to use the Multi-User Chat service. Everyone
will also be able to create new rooms but only the user [email protected] is allowed
to administrate any room. In this example he is also a global administrator. When
[email protected] sends a message such as ‘Tomorrow, the Jabber server will be moved
to new hardware. This will involve service breakdowns around 23:00 UMT. We apologise
for this inconvenience.’ to conference.example.org, it will be displayed in all active
rooms. In this example the history feature is disabled.
{acl, admin, {user, "admin", "example.org"}}.
{access, muc_admin, [{allow, admin}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_muc, [{access, all},
{access_create, all},
{access_admin, muc_admin},
{history_size, 0}]},
...
]}.
• In the second example the Multi-User Chat service is only accessible by paying customers
registered on our domains and on other servers. Of course the administrator is also allowed
to access rooms. In addition, he is the only authority able to create and administer rooms.
When [email protected] sends a message such as ‘Tomorrow, the Jabber server will be
moved to new hardware. This will involve service breakdowns around 23:00 UMT. We
apologise for this inconvenience.’ to conference.example.org, it will be displayed in all
active rooms. No history size option is used, this means that the feature is enabled and
the default value of 20 history messages will be send to the users.
{acl, paying_customers, {user, "customer1", "example.net"}}.

{acl, paying_customers, {user, "customer2", "example.com"}}.
{access, muc_admin, [{allow, admin},

{deny, all}]}.
{access, muc_access, [{allow, paying_customers},
{allow, admin},
{deny, all}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_muc, [{access, muc_access},
{access_create, muc_admin},
{access_admin, muc_admin}]},
...
]}.
• In the following example, MUC anti abuse options are used. An occupant cannot send
more than one message every 0.4 seconds and cannot change its presence more than once
every 4 seconds. No ACLs are defined, but some user restriction could be added as well:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_muc, [{min_message_interval, 0.4},
{min_presence_interval, 4}]},
...
]}.
• This example shows how to use default room options to make sure the newly created
rooms have by default those options.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_muc, [{access, muc_access},
{access_create, muc_admin},
{default_room_options,
[
{allow_change_subj, false},
{allow_query_users, true},
{allow_private_messages, true},
{members_by_default, false},
{title, "New chatroom"},
{anonymous, false}
]},
{access_admin, muc_admin}]},
...
]}.
3.3.11 mod muc log
This module enables optional logging of Multi-User Chat (MUC) public conversations to HTML.
Once you enable this module, users can join a room using a MUC capable Jabber client, and if
they have enough privileges, they can request the configuration form in which they can set the
option to enable room logging.
Features:
• Room details are added on top of each page: room title, JID, author, subject and configu-
ration.
• The room JID in the generated HTML is a link to join the room (using XMPP URI64 ).
• Subject and room configuration changes are tracked and displayed.
• Joins, leaves, nick changes, kicks, bans and ‘/me’ are tracked and displayed, including the
reason if available.
• Generated HTML files are XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS compliant.
• Timestamps are self-referencing links.
• Links on top for quicker navigation: Previous day, Next day, Up.
• CSS is used for style definition, and a custom CSS file can be used.
• URLs on messages and subjects are converted to hyperlinks.
• Timezone used on timestamps is shown on the log files.
• A custom link can be added on top of each page.
Options:
access log This option restricts which occupants are allowed to enable or disable room logging.
The default value is muc admin. Note for this default setting you need to have an access
rule for muc admin in order to take effect.
cssfile With this option you can set whether the HTML files should have a custom CSS file or if
they need to use the embedded CSS file. Allowed values are false and an URL to a CSS file.
With the first value, HTML files will include the embedded CSS code. With the latter, you
can specify the URL of the custom CSS file (for example: ‘http://example.com/my.css’).
The default value is false.
dirtype The type of the created directories can be specified with this option. Allowed values
are subdirs and plain. With the first value, subdirectories are created for each year and
month. With the latter, the names of the log files contain the full date, and there are no
subdirectories. The default value is subdirs.
outdir This option sets the full path to the directory in which the HTML files should be stored.
Make sure the ejabberd daemon user has write access on that directory. The default value
is "www/muc".
timezone The time zone for the logs is configurable with this option. Allowed values are local
and universal. With the first value, the local time, as reported to Erlang by the operating
system, will be used. With the latter, GMT/UTC time will be used. The default value is
local.
spam prevention To prevent spam, the spam prevention option adds a special attribute to
links that prevent their indexation by search engines. The default value is true, which
mean that nofollow attributes will be added to user submitted links.
top link With this option you can customize the link on the top right corner of each log file.
The syntax of this option is {"URL", "Text"}. The default value is {"/", "Home"}.
64 http://www.xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc5122.html
Examples:
• In the first example any room owner can enable logging, and a custom CSS file will be used
(http://example.com/my.css). The names of the log files will contain the full date, and
there will be no subdirectories. The log files will be stored in /var/www/muclogs, and the
time zone will be GMT/UTC. Finally, the top link will be <a href="http://www.jabber.ru/">Jabber.ru<
{access, muc, [{allow, all}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_muc_log, [
{access_log, muc},
{cssfile, "http://example.com/my.css"},
{dirtype, plain},
{outdir, "/var/www/muclogs"},
{timezone, universal},
{spam_prevention, true},
{top_link, {"http://www.jabber.ru/", "Jabber.ru"}}
]},
...
]}.
• In the second example only [email protected] and [email protected] can enable

logging, and the embedded CSS file will be used. The names of the log files will only
contain the day (number), and there will be subdirectories for each year and month. The
log files will be stored in /var/www/muclogs, and the local time will be used. Finally, the
top link will be the default <a href="/">Home</a>.
{acl, admins, {user, "admin1", "example.org"}}.

{acl, admins, {user, "admin2", "example.net"}}.
{access, muc_log, [{allow, admins},

{deny, all}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_muc_log, [
{access_log, muc_log},
{cssfile, false},
{dirtype, subdirs},
{outdir, "/var/www/muclogs"},
{timezone, local}
]},
...
]}.
3.3.12 mod offline
This module implements offline message storage. This means that all messages sent to an offline
user will be stored on the server until that user comes online again. Thus it is very similar
to how email works. Note that ejabberdctl has a command to delete expired messages (see
section 4.1).
user max messages This option is use to set a max number of offline messages per user (quota).
Its value can be either infinity or a strictly positive integer. The default value is
infinity.
3.3.13 mod privacy
This module implements Blocking Communication (also known as Privacy Rules) as defined in
section 10 from XMPP IM. If end users have support for it in their Jabber client, they will be
able to:
• Retrieving one’s privacy lists.

• Adding, removing, and editing one’s privacy lists.
• Setting, changing, or declining active lists.
• Setting, changing, or declining the default list (i.e., the list that is active by
default).
• Allowing or blocking messages based on JID, group, or subscription type (or
globally).
• Allowing or blocking inbound presence notifications based on JID, group, or
subscription type (or globally).
• Allowing or blocking outbound presence notifications based on JID, group, or
subscription type (or globally).
• Allowing or blocking IQ stanzas based on JID, group, or subscription type (or
globally).
• Allowing or blocking all communications based on JID, group, or subscription
type (or globally).
(from http://www.xmpp.org/specs/rfc3921.html#privacy)
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Blocking Communication (jabber:iq:privacy)
IQ queries (see section 3.3.2).
3.3.14 mod private
This module adds support for Private XML Storage (XEP-004965 ):
Using this method, Jabber entities can store private data on the server and retrieve
it whenever necessary. The data stored might be anything, as long as it is valid
XML. One typical usage for this namespace is the server-side storage of client-specific
preferences; another is Bookmark Storage (XEP-004866 ).
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Private XML Storage (jabber:iq:private)
3.3.15 mod proxy65
This module implements SOCKS5 Bytestreams (XEP-006567 ). It allows ejabberd to act as a

file transfer proxy between two XMPP clients.
Options:
host This option defines the hostname of the service. If this option is not set, the prefix ‘proxy.’
is added to ejabberd hostname.
name Defines Service Discovery name of the service. Default is "SOCKS5 Bytestreams".
ip This option specifies which network interface to listen for. Default is an IP address of the
service’s DNS name, or, if fails, {127,0,0,1}.
port This option defines port to listen for incoming connections. Default is 7777.
auth type SOCKS5 authentication type. Possible values are anonymous and plain. Default is
anonymous.
access Defines ACL for file transfer initiators. Default is all.
max connections Maximum number of active connections per file transfer initiator. No limit
by default.
shaper This option defines shaper for the file transfer peers. Shaper with the maximum band-
width will be selected. Default is none.
Examples:
• The simpliest configuration of the module:

{modules,
[
...
{mod_proxy65, []},
...
]}.
• More complicated configuration.
{acl, proxy_users, {server, "example.org"}}.

{access, proxy65_access, [{allow, proxy_users}, {deny, all}]}.

{shaper, proxyrate, {maxrate, 10240}}. %% 10 Kbytes/sec
{access, proxy65_shaper, [{none, admin}, {proxyrate, proxy_users}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_proxy65, [{host, "proxy1.example.org"},
{name, "File Transfer Proxy"},
{ip, {200,150,100,1}},
{port, 7778},
{max_connections, 5},
{access, proxy65_access},
{shaper, proxy65_shaper}]},
...
]}.
3.3.16 mod pubsub
This module offers a Publish-Subscribe Service (XEP-006068 ). The functionality in mod pubsub
can be extended using plugins. The plugin that implements PEP (Personal Eventing via Pubsub)
(XEP-016369 ) is enabled in the default ejabberd configuration file, and it requires mod caps.
Options:
Jabber ID will be the hostname of the virtual host with the prefix ‘pubsub.’. The keyword
access createnode This option restricts which users are allowed to create pubsub nodes using
ACL and ACCESS. The default value is pubsub createnode.
plugins To specify which pubsub node plugins to use. If not defined, the default pubsub plugin
is always used.
nodetree To specify which nodetree to use. If not defined, the default pubsub nodetree is used.
Nodetrees are default and virtual. Only one nodetree can be used and is shared by all node
plugins.
Example:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_pubsub, [
{access_createnode, pubsub_createnode},
{plugins, ["default", "pep"]}
]}
...
]}.
3.3.17 mod register
This module adds support for In-Band Registration (XEP-007770 ). This protocol enables end
users to use a Jabber client to:
• Register a new account on the server.

• Change the password from an existing account on the server.
• Delete an existing account on the server.
Options:
access This option can be configured to specify rules to restrict registration. If a rule returns
‘deny’ on the requested user name, registration for that user name is denied. (there are no
restrictions by default).
welcome message Set a welcome message that is sent to each newly registered account. The
first string is the subject, and the second string is the message body. In the body you can
set a newline with the characters: \n
registration watchers This option defines a list of JIDs which will be notified each time a
new account is registered.
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for In-Band Registration (jabber:iq:register)
This module reads also another option defined globally for the server: {registration timeout,
Timeout}. This option limits the frequency of registration from a given IP or username. So, a
user can’t register a new account from the same IP address or JID during this number of seconds
after previous registration. Timeout is expressed in seconds, and must be an integer. To disable
this limitation, instead of an integer put a word like: infinity. Default value: 600 seconds.
Examples:
• Next example prohibits the registration of too short account names:
{acl, shortname, {user_glob, "?"}}.

{acl, shortname, {user_glob, "??"}}.
%% The same using regexp:
%%{acl, shortname, {user_regexp, "^..?$"}}.
{access, register, [{deny, shortname},

{allow, all}]}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_register, [{access, register}]},
...
]}.
• The in-band registration of new accounts can be prohibited by changing the access op-
tion. If you really want to disable all In-Band Registration functionality, that is changing
passwords in-band and deleting accounts in-band, you have to remove mod register from
the modules list. In this example all In-Band Registration functionality is disabled:
{access, register, [{deny, all}]}.
{modules,
[
...
%% {mod_register, [{access, register}]},
...
]}.
• Define the welcome message and two registration watchers. Also define a registration
timeout of one hour:
{registration_timeout, 3600}.
{modules,
[
...
{mod_register,
[
{welcome_message, {"Welcome!", "Hi.\nWelcome to this Jabber server.\n Check http://www.jabbe
{registration_watchers, ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]}
]},
...
]}.
3.3.18 mod roster
This module implements roster management as defined in RFC 3921: XMPP IM71 .
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Roster Management (jabber:iq:roster) IQ
queries (see section 3.3.2).
3.3.19 mod service log
This module adds support for logging end user packets via a Jabber message auditing service
such as Bandersnatch72 . All user packets are encapsulated in a <route/> element and sent to
the specified service(s).
Options:
loggers With this option a (list of) service(s) that will receive the packets can be specified.
Examples:
• To log all end user packets to the Bandersnatch service running on bandersnatch.example.com:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_service_log, [{loggers, ["bandersnatch.example.com"]}]},
...
]}.
• To log all end user packets to the Bandersnatch service running on bandersnatch.example.com
and the backup service on bandersnatch.example.org:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_service_log, [{loggers, ["bandersnatch.example.com",
"bandersnatch.example.org"]}]},
...
]}.
71 http://www.xmpp.org/specs/rfc3921.html#roster
72 http://www.funkypenguin.info/project/bandersnatch/
3.3.20 mod shared roster
This module enables you to create shared roster groups. This means that you can create groups
of people that can see members from (other) groups in their rosters. The big advantages of this
feature are that end users do not need to manually add all users to their rosters, and that they
cannot permanently delete users from the shared roster groups. A shared roster group can have
members from any Jabber server, but the presence will only be available from and to members
of the same virtual host where the group is created.
Shared roster groups can be edited only via the Web Admin. Each group has a unique identifi-
cation and the following parameters:
Name The name of the group, which will be displayed in the roster.
Description The description of the group. This parameter does not affect anything.
Members A list of full JIDs of group members, entered one per line in the Web Admin. To put
as members all the registered users in the virtual hosts, you can use the special directive:
@all@. Note that this directive is designed for a small server with just a few hundred users.
Displayed groups A list of groups that will be in the rosters of this group’s members.
Examples:
• Take the case of a computer club that wants all its members seeing each other in their
rosters. To achieve this, they need to create a shared roster group similar to next table:
Identification Group ‘club members’

Name Club Members
Description Members from the computer club
[email protected]
Members [email protected]
[email protected]
Displayed groups club members
• In another case we have a company which has three divisions: Management, Marketing
and Sales. All group members should see all other members in their rosters. Additionally,
all managers should have all marketing and sales people in their roster. Simultaneously,
all marketeers and the whole sales team should see all managers. This scenario can be
achieved by creating shared roster groups as shown in the following table:
Identification Group ‘management’ Group ‘marketing’ Group ‘sales’

Name Management Marketing Sales
Description
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Members
management
management management
Displayed groups marketing
marketing sales
sales
3.3.21 mod stats
This module adds support for Statistics Gathering (XEP-003973 ). This protocol allows you to
retrieve next statistics from your ejabberd deployment:
• Total number of registered users on the current virtual host (users/total).
• Total number of registered users on all virtual hosts (users/all-hosts/total).
• Total number of online users on the current virtual host (users/online).
• Total number of online users on all virtual hosts (users/all-hosts/online).
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Statistics Gathering (http://jabber.org/protocol/stats)
As there are only a small amount of clients (for example Tkabber74 ) and software libraries with
support for this XEP, a few examples are given of the XML you need to send in order to get the
statistics. Here they are:
• You can request the number of online users on the current virtual host (example.org) by
sending:
<iq to=’example.org’ type=’get’>

<query xmlns=’http://jabber.org/protocol/stats’>
<stat name=’users/online’/>
</query>
</iq>
• You can request the total number of registered users on all virtual hosts by sending:
74 http://tkabber.jabber.ru/
<iq to=’example.org’ type=’get’>

<query xmlns=’http://jabber.org/protocol/stats’>
<stat name=’users/all-hosts/total’/>
</query>
</iq>
3.3.22 mod time
This module features support for Entity Time (XEP-009075 ). By using this XEP, you are able
to discover the time at another entity’s location.
Options:
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Entity Time (jabber:iq:time) IQ queries
(see section 3.3.2).
3.3.23 mod vcard
This module allows end users to store and retrieve their vCard, and to retrieve other users
vCards, as defined in vcard-temp (XEP-005476 ). The module also implements an uncomplicated
Jabber User Directory based on the vCards of these users. Moreover, it enables the server to
send its vCard when queried.
Options:
Jabber ID will be the hostname of the virtual host with the prefix ‘vjud.’. The keyword
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for vcard-temp IQ queries (see section 3.3.2).
search This option specifies whether the search functionality is enabled (value: true) or disabled
(value: false). If disabled, the option host will be ignored and the Jabber User Directory
service will not appear in the Service Discovery item list. The default value is true.
matches With this option, the number of reported search results can be limited. If the option’s
value is set to infinity, all search results are reported. The default value is 30.
allow return all This option enables you to specify if search operations with empty input
fields should return all users who added some information to their vCard. The default
value is false.
search all hosts If this option is set to true, search operations will apply to all virtual hosts.
Otherwise only the current host will be searched. The default value is true. This option
is available in mod vcard, but not available in mod vcard odbc.
Examples:
• In this first situation, search results are limited to twenty items, every user who added
information to their vCard will be listed when people do an empty search, and only users
from the current host will be returned:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_vcard, [{search, true},
{matches, 20},
{allow_return_all, true},
{search_all_hosts, false}]},
...
]}.
• The second situation differs in a way that search results are not limited, and that all virtual
hosts will be searched instead of only the current one:
{modules,
[
...
{mod_vcard, [{search, true},
{matches, infinity},
{allow_return_all, true}]},
...
]}.
3.3.24 mod vcard ldap
ejabberd can map LDAP attributes to vCard fields. This behaviour is implemented in the
mod vcard ldap module. This module does not depend on the authentication method (see 3.2.5).
Note that ejabberd treats LDAP as a read-only storage: it is possible to consult data, but not
possible to create accounts, change password or edit vCard that is stored in LDAP.
The mod vcard ldap module has its own optional parameters. The first group of parameters
has the same meaning as the top-level LDAP parameters to set the authentication method:
ldap servers, ldap port, ldap rootdn, ldap password, ldap base, ldap uids, and ldap filter.
See section 3.2.5 for detailed information about these options. If one of these options is not set,
ejabberd will look for the top-level option with the same name.
The second group of parameters consists of the following mod vcard ldap-specific options:
Jabber ID will be the hostname of the virtual host with the prefix ‘vjud.’. The keyword
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for vcard-temp IQ queries (see section 3.3.2).
search This option specifies whether the search functionality is enabled (value: true) or disabled
(value: false). If disabled, the option host will be ignored and the Jabber User Directory
service will not appear in the Service Discovery item list. The default value is true.
matches With this option, the number of reported search results can be limited. If the option’s
value is set to infinity, all search results are reported. The default value is 30.
ldap vcard map With this option you can set the table that maps LDAP attributes to vCard
fields. The format is: [Name of vCard field, Pattern, List of LDAP attributes, ...].
Name of vcard field is the type name of the vCard as defined in RFC 242677 . Pattern is
a string which contains pattern variables "%u", "%d" or "%s". List of LDAP attributes
is the list containing LDAP attributes. The pattern variables "%s" will be sequentially
replaced with the values of LDAP attributes from List of LDAP attributes, "%u" will be
replaced with the user part of a JID, and "%d" will be replaced with the domain part of a
JID. The default is:
[{"NICKNAME", "%u", []},

{"LAST", "%s", ["sn"]},
{"FIRST", "%s", ["givenName"]},
{"MIDDLE", "%s", ["initials"]},
{"ORGNAME", "%s", ["o"]},
{"ORGUNIT", "%s", ["ou"]},
{"CTRY", "%s", ["c"]},
{"LOCALITY", "%s", ["l"]},
{"STREET", "%s", ["street"]},
{"REGION", "%s", ["st"]},
{"PCODE", "%s", ["postalCode"]},
{"TITLE", "%s", ["title"]},
{"URL", "%s", ["labeleduri"]},
{"DESC", "%s", ["description"]},
{"TEL", "%s", ["telephoneNumber"]},
{"EMAIL", "%s", ["mail"]},
{"BDAY", "%s", ["birthDay"]},
{"ROLE", "%s", ["employeeType"]},
{"PHOTO", "%s", ["jpegPhoto"]}]
ldap search fields This option defines the search form and the LDAP attributes to search
within. The format is: [Name, Attribute, ...]. Name is the name of a search form field
which will be automatically translated by using the translation files (see msgs/*.msg for
available words). Attribute is the LDAP attribute or the pattern "%u". The default is:
[{"User", "%u"},
{"Full Name", "displayName"},
{"Given Name", "givenName"},
{"Middle Name", "initials"},
77 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt
{"Nickname", "%u"},
{"Birthday", "birthDay"},
{"Country", "c"},
{"City", "l"},
{"Email", "mail"},
{"Organization Name", "o"},
{"Organization Unit", "ou"}]
ldap search reported This option defines which search fields should be reported. The format
is: [Name, vCard Name, ...]. Name is the name of a search form field which will be
automatically translated by using the translation files (see msgs/*.msg for available words).
vCard Name is the vCard field name defined in the ldap vcard map option. The default is:

{"Given Name", "FIRST"},
{"Middle Name", "MIDDLE"},
{"Family Name", "LAST"},
{"Birthday", "BDAY"},
{"Country", "CTRY"},
{"City", "LOCALITY"},
{"Email", "EMAIL"},
{"Organization Name", "ORGNAME"},
{"Organization Unit", "ORGUNIT"}]
Examples:
• Let’s say ldap.example.org is the name of our LDAP server. We have users with their
passwords in "ou=Users,dc=example,dc=org" directory. Also we have addressbook, which
contains users emails and their additional infos in "ou=AddressBook,dc=example,dc=org"
directory. Corresponding authentication section should looks like this:
%% authentication method
%% DNS name of our LDAP server
%% We want to authorize users from ’shadowAccount’ object class only
{ldap_filter, "(objectClass=shadowAccount)"}.
Now we want to use users LDAP-info as their vCards. We have four attributes defined in
our LDAP schema: "mail" — email address, "givenName" — first name, "sn" — second
name, "birthDay" — birthday. Also we want users to search each other. Let’s see how we
can set it up:
{modules,
...
{mod_vcard_ldap,
[
%% We use the same server and port, but want to bind anonymously because
%% our LDAP server accepts anonymous requests to
%% "ou=AddressBook,dc=example,dc=org" subtree.
{ldap_rootdn, ""},
{ldap_password, ""},
%% define the addressbook’s base
{ldap_base, "ou=AddressBook,dc=example,dc=org"},
%% uidattr: user’s part of JID is located in the "mail" attribute
%% uidattr_format: common format for our emails
{ldap_uids, [{"mail","%[email protected]"}]},
%% We have to define empty filter here, because entries in addressbook does not
%% belong to shadowAccount object class
{ldap_filter, ""},
%% Now we want to define vCard pattern
{ldap_vcard_map,
[{"NICKNAME", "%u", []}, % just use user’s part of JID as his nickname
{"FIRST", "%s", ["givenName"]},
{"LAST", "%s", ["sn"]},
{"FN", "%s, %s", ["sn", "givenName"]}, % example: "Smith, John"
{"EMAIL", "%s", ["mail"]},
{"BDAY", "%s", ["birthDay"]}]},
%% Search form
[{"User", "%u"},
{"Email", "mail"},
{"Birthday", "birthDay"}]},
%% vCard fields to be reported
%% Note that JID is always returned with search results
{"Birthday", "BDAY"}]}
]}
...
}.
Note that mod vcard ldap module checks an existence of the user before searching his info
in LDAP.
• ldap vcard map example:
{ldap_vcard_map,
[{"NICKNAME", "%u", []},
{"CTRY", "Russia", []},
{"EMAIL", "%u@%d", []},
{"DESC", "%s\n%s", ["title", "description"]}
]},
• ldap search fields example:
[{"User", "uid"},
{"Full Name", "displayName"},
{"Email", "mail"}
]},
• ldap search reported example:
{"Email", "EMAIL"},
{"Birthday", "BDAY"},
{"Nickname", "NICKNAME"}
]},
3.3.25 mod version
This module implements Software Version (XEP-009278 ). Consequently, it answers ejabberd’s

version when queried.
Options:
show os Should the operating system be revealed or not. The default value is true.
iqdisc This specifies the processing discipline for Software Version (jabber:iq:version) IQ
queries (see section 3.3.2).
Chapter 4
Managing an ejabberd Server
4.1 ejabberdctl
4.1.1 Commands
The ejabberdctl command line administration script allows to start, stop and perform many
other administrative tasks in a local or remote ejabberd server.
When ejabberdctl is executed without any parameter, it displays the available options. If there
isn’t an ejabberd server running, the available parameters are:
start Start ejabberd in background mode. This is the default method.
debug Attach an Erlang shell to an already existing ejabberd server. This allows to execute
commands interactively in the ejabberd server.
live Start ejabberd in live mode: the shell keeps attached to the started server, showing log
messages and allowing to execute interactive commands.
If there is an ejabberd server running in the system, ejabberdctl shows all the available
commands in that server. The more interesting ones are:
status Check the status of the ejabberd server.
stop Stop the ejabberd server which is running in the machine.
reopen-log Reopen the log files after they were renamed. If the old files were not renamed
before calling this command, they are automatically renamed to "*-old.log". See section
7.1.
backup ejabberd.backup Store internal Mnesia database to a binary backup file.
77
78 4. Managing an ejabberd Server
restore ejabberd.backup Restore immediately from a binary backup file the internal Mnesia
database. This will consume quite some memory for big servers.
install-fallback ejabberd.backup The binary backup file is installed as fallback: it will be
used to restore the database at the next ejabberd start. Similar to restore, but requires
less memory.
dump ejabberd.dump Dump internal Mnesia database to a text file dump.
load ejabberd.dump Restore immediately from a text file dump. This is not recommended
for big databases, as it will consume much time, memory and processor. In that case it’s
preferable to use backup and install-fallback.
import-file, import-dir These options can be used to migrate from other Jabber/XMPP
servers. There exist tutorials to migrate from other software to ejabberd1 .
delete-expired-messages This option can be used to delete old messages in offline storage.
This might be useful when the number of offline messages is very high.
The ejabberdctl script also allows the argument --node NODENAME. This allows to administer
a remote node.
The ejabberdctl script can be configured in the file ejabberdctl.cfg. This file includes de-
tailed information about each configurable option.
The ejabberdctl script returns a numerical status code. Success is represented by 0, error is
represented by 1, and other codes may be used for specific results. This can be used by other
scripts to determine automatically if a command succeeded or failed, for example using: echo
$?
4.1.2 Erlang Runtime System
ejabberd is an Erlang/OTP application that runs inside an Erlang runtime system. This system
is configured using environment variables and command line parameters. The ejabberdctl
administration script uses many of those possibilities. You can configure some of them with the
file ejabberdctl.cfg, which includes detailed description about them. This section describes
for reference purposes all the environment variables and command line parameters.
The environment variables:
EJABBERD CONFIG PATH Path to the ejabberd configuration file.

EJABBERD MSGS PATH Path to the directory with translated strings.
EJABBERD LOG PATH Path to the ejabberd service log file.
EJABBERD SO PATH Path to the directory with binary system libraries.
HOME Path to the directory that is considered ejabberd’s home. This path is used to read the
file .erlang.cookie.
1 http://www.ejabberd.im/migrate-to-ejabberd
4.1 ejabberdctl 79
ERL CRASH DUMP Path to the file where crash reports will be dumped.
ERL INETRC Indicates which IP name resolution to use. It is required if using -sname.
ERL MAX PORTS Maximum number of simultaneously open Erlang ports.
ERL MAX ETS TABLES Maximum number of ETS and Mnesia tables.
The command line parameters:
-sname ejabberd The Erlang node will be identified using only the first part of the host name,
i. e. other Erlang nodes outside this domain cannot contact this node. This is the preferable
option in most cases.
-name ejabberd The Erlang node will be fully identified. This is only useful if you plan to setup
an ejabberd cluster with nodes in different networks.
-kernel inetrc "/etc/ejabberd/inetrc" Indicates which IP name resolution to use. It is

required if using -sname.
-detached Starts the Erlang system detached from the system console. Useful for running
daemons and backgrounds processes.
-noinput Ensures that the Erlang system never tries to read any input. Useful for running
daemons and backgrounds processes.
-pa /var/lib/ejabberd/ebin Specify the directory where Erlang binary files (*.beam) are lo-
cated.
-s ejabberd Tell Erlang runtime system to start the ejabberd application.
-mnesia dir "/var/lib/ejabberd/db/nodename" Specify the Mnesia database directory.
-sasl sasl error logger {file, "/var/log/ejabberd/sasl.log"} Path to the Erlang/OTP

system log file.
+K [true|false] Kernel polling.
-smp [auto|enable|disable] SMP support.
+P 250000 Maximum number of Erlang processes.
-remsh ejabberd@localhost Open an Erlang shell in a remote Erlang node.
Note that some characters need to be escaped when used in shell scripts, for instance " and {}.
You can find other options in the Erlang manual page (erl -man erl).
4.2 Web Admin
The ejabberd Web Admin allows to administer most of ejabberd using a web browser.
This feature is enabled by default: a ejabberd http listener with the option web admin (see
section 3.1.3) is included in the listening ports. Then you can open http://server:port/admin/
in your favourite web browser. You will be asked to enter the username (the full Jabber ID)
and password of an ejabberd user with administrator rights. After authentication you will see
a page similar to figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1: Top page from the Web Admin
Here you can edit access restrictions, manage users, create backups, manage the database, en-
able/disable ports listened for, view server statistics,. . .
Examples:
• You can serve the Web Admin on the same port as the HTTP Polling interface. In this
example you should point your web browser to http://example.org:5280/admin/ to ad-
minister all virtual hosts or to http://example.org:5280/admin/server/example.com/
to administer only the virtual host example.com. Before you get access to the Web Admin
you need to enter as username, the JID and password from a registered user that is allowed
to configure ejabberd. In this example you can enter as username ‘[email protected]’
to administer all virtual hosts (first URL). If you log in with ‘[email protected]’ on
http://example.org:5280/admin/server/example.com/ you can only administer the
virtual host example.com.
{acl, admins, {user, "admin", "example.net"}}.

{host_config, "example.com", [{acl, admins, {user, "admin", "example.com"}}]}.
{access, configure, [{allow, admins}]}.
4.3 Ad-hoc Commands 81
{listen,
[
...
{5280, ejabberd_http, [http_poll, web_admin]},
...
]}.
• For security reasons, you can serve the Web Admin on a secured connection, on a port differ-
ing from the HTTP Polling interface, and bind it to the internal LAN IP. The Web Admin
will be accessible by pointing your web browser to https://192.168.1.1:5280/admin/:
{listen,
[
...
{5270, ejabberd_http, [http_poll]},
{5280, ejabberd_http, [web_admin, {ip, {192, 168, 1, 1}},
tls, {certfile, "/usr/local/etc/server.pem"}]},
...
]}.
4.3 Ad-hoc Commands
If you enable mod configure and mod adhoc, you can perform several administrative tasks in
ejabberd with a Jabber client. The client must support Ad-Hoc Commands (XEP-00502 ), and
you must login in the Jabber server with an account with proper privileges.
4.4 Change Computer Hostname
ejabberd uses the distributed Mnesia database. Being distributed, Mnesia enforces consistency
of its file, so it stores the name of the Erlang node in it (see section 5.4). The name of an Erlang
node includes the hostname of the computer. So, the name of the Erlang node changes if you
change the name of the machine in which ejabberd runs, or when you move ejabberd to a
different machine.
So, if you want to change the computer hostname where ejabberd is installed, you must follow
these instructions:
1. In the old server, backup the Mnesia database using the Web Admin or ejabberdctl. For
example:
ejabberdctl backup /tmp/ejabberd-oldhost.backup

2. In the new server, restore the backup file using the Web Admin or ejabberdctl. For
example:
ejabberdctl restore /tmp/ejabberd-oldhost.backup

Chapter 5
Securing ejabberd
5.1 Firewall Settings
You need to take the following TCP ports in mind when configuring your firewall:
Port Description
5222 Standard port for Jabber/XMPP client connections, plain or STARTTLS.
5223 Standard port for Jabber client connections using the old SSL method.
5269 Standard port for Jabber/XMPP server connections.
4369 Port used by EPMD for communication between Erlang nodes.
port range Used for connections between Erlang nodes. This range is configurable.
5.2 epmd
epmd (Erlang Port Mapper Daemon)1 is a small name server included in Erlang/OTP and used
by Erlang programs when establishing distributed Erlang communications. ejabberd needs
epmd to use ejabberdctl and also when clustering ejabberd nodes. This small program is
automatically started by Erlang, and is never stopped. If ejabberd is stopped, and there aren’t
any other Erlang programs running in the system, you can safely stop epmd if you want.
ejabberd runs inside an Erlang node. To communicate with ejabberd, the script ejabberdctl
starts a new Erlang node and connects to the Erlang node that holds ejabberd. In order for
this communication to work, epmd must be running and listening for name requests in the port
4369. You should block the port 4369 in the firewall, so only the programs in your machine can
access it.
If you build a cluster of several ejabberd instances, each ejabberd instance is called an ejabberd
node. Those ejabberd nodes use a special Erlang communication method to build the cluster,
1 http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/epmd.html
83
84 5. Securing ejabberd
and EPMD is again needed listening in the port 4369. So, if you plan to build a cluster of
ejabberd nodes you must open the port 4369 for the machines involved in the cluster. Remember
to block the port so Internet doesn’t have access to it.
Once an Erlang node solved the node name of another Erlang node using EPMD and port 4369,
the nodes communicate directly. The ports used in this case are random. You can limit the
range of ports when starting Erlang with a command-line parameter, for example:
erl ... -kernel inet_dist_listen_min 4370 inet_dist_listen_max 4375
5.3 Erlang Cookie
The Erlang cookie is a string with numbers and letters. An Erlang node reads the cookie at
startup from the command-line parameter -setcookie. If not indicated, the cookie is read from
the cookie file $HOME/.erlang.cookie. If this file does not exist, it is created immediately with
a random cookie. Two Erlang nodes communicate only if they have the same cookie. Setting a
cookie on the Erlang node allows you to structure your Erlang network and define which nodes
are allowed to connect to which.
Thanks to Erlang cookies, you can prevent access to the Erlang node by mistake, for example
when there are several Erlang nodes running different programs in the same machine.
Setting a secret cookie is a simple method to difficult unauthorized access to your Erlang node.
However, the cookie system is not ultimately effective to prevent unauthorized access or intrusion
to an Erlang node. The communication between Erlang nodes are not encrypted, so the cookie
could be read sniffing the traffic on the network. The recommended way to secure the Erlang
node is to block the port 4369.
5.4 Erlang Node Name
An Erlang node may have a node name. The name can be short (if indicated with the command-
line parameter -sname) or long (if indicated with the parameter -name). Starting an Erlang node
with -sname limits the communication between Erlang nodes to the LAN.
Using the option -sname instead of -name is a simple method to difficult unauthorized access to
your Erlang node. However, it is not ultimately effective to prevent access to the Erlang node,
because it may be possible to fake the fact that you are on another network using a modified
version of Erlang epmd. The recommended way to secure the Erlang node is to block the port
4369.
5.5 Securing Sensible Files
ejabberd stores sensible data in the file system either in plain text or binary files. The file
system permissions should be set to only allow the proper user to read, write and execute those
files and directories.
5.5 Securing Sensible Files 85
ejabberd configuration file: /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg Contains the JID of admin-

istrators and passwords of external components. The backup files probably contain also
this information, so it is preferable to secure the whole /etc/ejabberd/ directory.
ejabberd service log: /var/log/ejabberd/ejabberd.log Contains IP addresses of clients.
If the loglevel is set to 5, it contains whole conversations and passwords. If a logrotate sys-
tem is used, there may be several log files with similar information, so it is preferable to
secure the whole /var/log/ejabberd/ directory.
Mnesia database spool files: /var/lib/ejabberd/db/* The files store binary data, but
some parts are still readable. The files are generated by Mnesia and their permissions
cannot be set directly, so it is preferable to secure the whole /var/lib/ejabberd/db/
directory.
Erlang cookie file: /var/lib/ejabberd/.erlang.cookie See section 5.3.
86 5. Securing ejabberd
Chapter 6
Clustering
6.1 How it Works
A Jabber domain is served by one or more ejabberd nodes. These nodes can be run on different
machines that are connected via a network. They all must have the ability to connect to port 4369
of all another nodes, and must have the same magic cookie (see Erlang/OTP documentation,
in other words the file ~ejabberd/.erlang.cookie must be the same on all nodes). This is
needed because all nodes exchange information about connected users, s2s connections, registered
services, etc. . .
Each ejabberd node has the following modules:
• router,
• local router,
• session manager,
• s2s manager.
6.1.1 Router
This module is the main router of Jabber packets on each node. It routes them based on their
destination’s domains. It uses a global routing table. The domain of the packet’s destination is
searched in the routing table, and if it is found, the packet is routed to the appropriate process.
If not, it is sent to the s2s manager.
6.1.2 Local Router
This module routes packets which have a destination domain equal to one of this server’s host
names. If the destination JID has a non-empty user part, it is routed to the session manager,
otherwise it is processed depending on its content.
87
88 6. Clustering
6.1.3 Session Manager
This module routes packets to local users. It looks up to which user resource a packet must be
sent via a presence table. Then the packet is either routed to the appropriate c2s process, or
stored in offline storage, or bounced back.
6.1.4 s2s Manager
This module routes packets to other Jabber servers. First, it checks if an opened s2s connection
from the domain of the packet’s source to the domain of the packet’s destination exists. If that
is the case, the s2s manager routes the packet to the process serving this connection, otherwise
a new connection is opened.
6.2 Clustering Setup
Suppose you already configured ejabberd on one machine named (first), and you need to setup
another one to make an ejabberd cluster. Then do following steps:
1. Copy ~ejabberd/.erlang.cookie file from first to second.

(alt) You can also add ‘-cookie content_of_.erlang.cookie’ option to all ‘erl’ com-
mands below.
2. On second run the following command as the ejabberd daemon user, in the working
directory of ejabberd:
erl -sname ejabberd \

-mnesia dir "/var/lib/ejabberd/" \
-mnesia extra_db_nodes "[’ejabberd@first’]" \
-s mnesia
This will start Mnesia serving the same database as ejabberd@first. You can check this
by running the command ‘mnesia:info().’. You should see a lot of remote tables and a
line like the following:
Note: the Mnesia directory may be different in your system. To know where does ejabberd
expect Mnesia to be installed by default, call 4.1 without options and it will show some
help, including the Mnesia database spool dir.
running db nodes = [ejabberd@first, ejabberd@second]
3. Now run the following in the same ‘erl’ session:
mnesia:change_table_copy_type(schema, node(), disc_copies).

6.3 Service Load-Balancing 89
This will create local disc storage for the database.

(alt) Change storage type of the scheme table to ‘RAM and disc copy’ on the second node
via the Web Admin.
4. Now you can add replicas of various tables to this node with ‘mnesia:add_table_copy’
or ‘mnesia:change_table_copy_type’ as above (just replace ‘schema’ with another table
name and ‘disc_copies’ can be replaced with ‘ram_copies’ or ‘disc_only_copies’).
Which tables to replicate is very dependant on your needs, you can get some hints from
the command ‘mnesia:info().’, by looking at the size of tables and the default storage
type for each table on ’first’.
Replicating a table makes lookups in this table faster on this node. Writing, on the other
hand, will be slower. And of course if machine with one of the replicas is down, other
replicas will be used.
Also section 5.3 (Table Fragmentation) of Mnesia User’s Guide1 can be helpful.
(alt) Same as in previous item, but for other tables.
5. Run ‘init:stop().’ or just ‘q().’ to exit from the Erlang shell. This probably can take
some time if Mnesia has not yet transfered and processed all data it needed from first.
6. Now run ejabberd on second with a configuration similar as on first: you probably do
not need to duplicate ‘acl’ and ‘access’ options because they will be taken from first;
and mod_irc should be enabled only on one machine in the cluster.
You can repeat these steps for other machines supposed to serve this domain.
6.3 Service Load-Balancing
6.3.1 Components Load-Balancing
6.3.2 Domain Load-Balancing Algorithm
ejabberd includes an algorithm to load balance the components that are plugged on an ejabberd
cluster. It means that you can plug one or several instances of the same component on each
ejabberd cluster and that the traffic will be automatically distributed.
The default distribution algorithm try to deliver to a local instance of a component. If several
local instances are available, one instance is chosen randomly. If no instance is available locally,
one instance is chosen randomly among the remote component instances.
If you need a different behaviour, you can change the load balancing behaviour with the option
domain balancing. The syntax of the option is the following:
{domain_balancing, "component.example.com", <balancing_criterium>}.

1 http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/Mnesia chap5.html#5.3
90 6. Clustering
Several balancing criteria are available:
• destination: the full JID of the packet to attribute is used.
• source: the full JID of the packet from attribute is used.

• bare destination: the bare JID (without resource) of the packet to attribute is used.
• bare source: the bare JID (without resource) of the packet from attribute is used.
If the value corresponding to the criteria is the same, the same component instance in the cluster
will be used.
6.3.3 Load-Balancing Buckets
When there is a risk of failure for a given component, domain balancing can cause service trouble.
If one component is failing the service will not work correctly unless the sessions are rebalanced.
In this case, it is best to limit the problem to the sessions handled by the failing component.
This is what the domain balancing component number option does, making the load balancing
algorithm not dynamic, but sticky on a fix number of component instances.
The syntax is the following:
{domain_balancing_component_number, "component.example.com", N}
Chapter 7
Debugging
7.1 Log Files
An ejabberd node writes two log files:
ejabberd.log is the ejabberd service log, with the messages reported by ejabberd code
sasl.log is the Erlang/OTP system log, with the messages reported by Erlang/OTP using
SASL (System Architecture Support Libraries)
The option loglevel modifies the verbosity of the file ejabberd.log. The possible levels are:
0 No ejabberd log at all (not recommended)

1 Critical
2 Error
3 Warning
4 Info
5 Debug
For example, the default configuration is:
{loglevel, 4}.
The log files grow continually, so it is recommended to rotate them periodically. To rotate the
log files, rename the files and then reopen them. The ejabberd command reopen-log (please
refer to section 4.1.1) reopens the log files, and also renames the old ones if you didn’t rename
them.
91
92 7. Debugging
7.2 Debug Console
The Debug Console is an Erlang shell attached to an already running ejabberd server. With
this Erlang shell, an experienced administrator can perform complex tasks.
This shell gives complete control over the ejabberd server, so it is important to use it with
extremely care. There are some simple and safe examples in the article Interconnecting Erlang
Nodes1
To exit the shell, close the window or press the keys: control+c control+c.
7.3 Watchdog Alerts
ejabberd includes a watchdog mechanism that may be useful to developers when troubleshooting
a problem related to memory usage. If a process in the ejabberd server consumes a lot of
memory, a message is sent to the Jabber accounts defined with the option watchdog admins
in the ejabberd configuration file. Note that the threshold to define what is too much memory
usage is only configurable editing the source code. Example configuration:
{watchdog_admins, ["admin2@localhost", "[email protected]"]}.
To remove watchdog admins, remove them in the option. To remove all watchdog admins, set
the option with an empty list:
{watchdog_admins, []}.
1 http://www.ejabberd.im/interconnect-erl-nodes
Appendix A
Internationalization and
Localization
All built-in modules support the xml:lang attribute inside IQ queries. Figure A.1, for example,
shows the reply to the following query:
<iq id=’5’
to=’example.org’
type=’get’
xml:lang=’ru’>
<query xmlns=’http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#items’/>
</iq>
Figure A.1: Service Discovery when xml:lang=’ru’
93
94 A. Internationalization and Localization
The Web Admin also supports the Accept-Language HTTP header.
Figure A.2: Web Admin showing a virtual host when the web browser provides the HTTP header
‘Accept-Language: ru’
Appendix B
Release Notes
Release notes are available from ejabberd Home Page1
1 http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/release notes/
95
96 B. Release Notes
Appendix C
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all people who contributed to this guide:
• Alexey Shchepin (xmpp:[email protected])

• Badlop (xmpp:[email protected])
• Evgeniy Khramtsov (xmpp:[email protected])

• Florian Zumbiehl (xmpp:[email protected])
• Michael Grigutsch (xmpp:[email protected])
• Mickael Remond (xmpp:[email protected])
• Sander Devrieze (xmpp:[email protected])
• Sergei Golovan (xmpp:[email protected])
• Vsevolod Pelipas (xmpp:[email protected])
97
98 C. Acknowledgements
Appendix D
Copyright Information
Ejabberd Installation and Operation Guide.

Copyright
c 2003 — 2009 ProcessOne
This document is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This document is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WAR-
RANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this document;
if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301, USA.
99
Index
access, 33 bsd, 15
Access Control List, 31, 33 compile, 13
access rules, 31 download, 13
ACL, 31, 33 install, 14
announcements, 49 solaris, 15
anonymous login, 29 start, 15
authentication, 28 windows, 16
installation
Bandersnatch, 68 requirements, 13
Blocking Communication, 63 internal authentication, 28
internationalization, 93
clustering, 87
IPv6, 23
how it works, 87
IRC, 55
local router, 87
ports, 83 Jabber User Directory, 71, 72
router, 87 jabberd 1.4, 27
s2s manager, 88 JUD, 71, 72
session manager, 88 JWChat, 23
setup, 88
component load-balancing, 89 l10n, 93
conferencing, 56 language, 35
configuration file, 19 LDAP, 20
localization, 93
database, 35
databases maxrate, 34
Active Directory, 45 message auditing, 68
LDAP, 42 message of the day, 49
ODBC, 41 Microsoft SQL Server, 38
debugging, 52, 91 authentication, 39
watchdog, 92 Database Connection, 38
Driver Compilation, 38
ejabberdctl, 17, 63 schema, 38
storage, 39
features
migration from other software, 78
additional features, 9
Mnesia, 28
key features, 8
modhttpbind, 52
firewall, 83
modhttpfileserver, 54
host names, 19 modules, 46
mod announce, 49
i18n, 93 mod disco, 51
install, 12 mod echo, 49, 52
100
INDEX 101
mod http bind, 52 default room options, 58

mod http fileserver, 54 defaultencoding, 55
mod irc, 55 dirtype, 61
mod last, 56 docroot, 54
mod muc log, 60 domain balancing, 89
mod muc, 56 domain balancing component number, 90
mod offline, 50, 63 domain certfile, 24
mod privacy, 63 extra domains, 51
mod private, 64 history size, 57
mod pubsub, 65 host, 49, 52, 55, 57, 64, 65, 71, 72
mod register, 66 host config, 20
mod roster, 68 hosts, 19, 22
mod service log, 68 http bind, 23
mod shared roster, 69 http poll, 23
mod stats, 70 inet6, 23
mod time, 71 ip, 23, 64
mod vcard ldap, 72 iqdisc, 48, 51, 56, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73,
mod vcard, 71 76
mod version, 64, 76 language, 35
ejabberd c2s, 22 ldap base, 43
ejabberd http, 22 ldap filter, 43
ejabberd s2s in, 22 ldap local filter, 43
ejabberd service, 22 ldap password, 43
overview, 47 ldap port, 42
MOTD, 49 ldap rootdn, 42
MySQL, 36 ldap search fields, 73
authentication, 37 ldap search reported, 74
Database Connection, 36 ldap server, 42
Driver Compilation, 36 ldap uidattr, 43
schema, 36 ldap uidattr format, 43
storage, 38 ldap uids, 43
ldap vcard map, 73
ODBC, 20 listen, 22
authentication, 42 loggers, 68
Database Connection, 41 matches, 71, 73
storage, 42 max connections, 64
options max s2s connections, 34
access, 22, 50, 55, 57, 64, 66 max stanza size, 23
access admin, 57 max user conferences, 57
access create, 57 max user sessions, 33
access createnode, 65 max users, 57
access log, 61 max users admin threshold, 57
access persistent, 57 maxrate, 34
accesslog, 54 min message interval, 57
acl, 31, 33 min presence interval, 58
allow return all, 71 name, 64
auth method, 28 outdir, 61
auth type, 64 pam service, 30
cssfile, 61 port, 64
102 Index
registratimeout, 66 XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat, 55, 56

rwatchers, 66 XEP-0048: Bookmark Storage, 64
s2s certificate, 24 XEP-0049: Private XML Storage, 64
s2s max retry delay, 24 XEP-0054: vcard-temp, 71, 72
s2s use starttls, 24 XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe, 65
search, 71, 73 XEP-0065: SOCKS5 Bytestreams, 64
search all hosts, 71 XEP-0077: In-Band Registration, 66
service check from, 22 XEP-0090: Entity Time, 71
shaper, 23, 34, 64 XEP-0092: Software Version, 76
showos, 76 XEP-0094: Agent Information, 51
spam prevention, 61 XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol,
starttls, 24 22
starttls required, 24 XEP-0138: Stream Compression, 24
timezone, 61 XEP-0206: HTTP Binding, 23
tls, 24 public registration, 66
top link, 61
release notes, 95
user max messages, 63
roster management, 68
watchdog admins, 92
web admin, 24 SASL, 83
welcomem, 66 sasl anonymous, 29
zlib, 24 shapers, 34
shared roster groups, 69
PAM authentication, 30 STARTTLS, 24
Pluggable Authentication Modules, 30 statistics, 70
ports, 83 Subversion repository, 13
PostgreSQL, 39
Tkabber, 70
authentication, 40
TLS, 24, 83
Database Connection, 40
traffic speed, 34
Driver Compilation, 39
transports
schema, 39
AIM, 26
storage, 41
email notifier, 26
Privacy Rules, 63
Gadu-Gadu, 26
protocols
ICQ, 26
groupchat 1.0, 55
MSN, 26
RFC 2254: The String Representation of
Yahoo, 26
LDAP Search Filters, 43
RFC 2426: vCard MIME Directory Pro- vCard, 71, 72
file, 73 virtual domains, 20
RFC 3921: XMPP IM, 63, 68 virtual hosting, 20
RFC 5122: Internationalized Resource Iden- virtual hosts, 20
tifiers (IRIs) and Uniform Resource Iden-
tifiers (URIs) for the Extensible Mes- web admin, 24, 80
saging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), web-based Jabber client, 23
61 WPJabber, 27
XEP-0011: Jabber Browsing, 51 XDB, 27
XEP-0012: Last Activity, 56 xml:lang, 93
XEP-0025: HTTP Polling, 23, 80 XMPP compliancy, 47
XEP-0030: Service Discovery, 51
XEP-0039: Statistics Gathering, 70 Zlib, 24

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ejabberd 2.0.

Installation and Operation Guide

ejabberd Development Team

1.1 Key Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1.2 Additional Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.1 Installing ejabberd with Binary Installer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.2 Installing ejabberd with Operating System Specific Packages . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.3 Installing ejabberd with CEAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.4 Installing ejabberd from Source Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.4.2 Download Source Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

2.4.6 Specific Notes for BSD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.4.7 Specific Notes for Sun Solaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.4.8 Specific Notes for Microsoft Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.5 Create a Jabber Account for Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2.6 Upgrading ejabberd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

3.1 Basic Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.1.1 Host Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.1.2 Virtual Hosting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

3.1.3 Listening Ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3.1.5 Access Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

3.1.7 Default Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

3.2 Database and LDAP Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

3.2.2 Microsoft SQL Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

3.2.4 ODBC Compatible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

3.3 Modules Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

3.3.1 Modules Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

3.3.2 Common Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

3.3.3 mod announce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

3.3.4 mod disco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

3.3.5 mod echo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

3.3.6 mod http bind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

3.3.7 mod http fileserver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

3.3.8 mod irc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

3.3.9 mod last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

3.3.10 mod muc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

3.3.11 mod muc log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

3.3.12 mod offline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

3.3.13 mod privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

3.3.14 mod private . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

3.3.15 mod proxy65 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

3.3.16 mod pubsub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

3.3.17 mod register . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

3.3.18 mod roster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

3.3.19 mod service log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

3.3.20 mod shared roster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

3.3.21 mod stats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

3.3.22 mod time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.3.23 mod vcard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.3.24 mod vcard ldap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

3.3.25 mod version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

4 Managing an ejabberd Server 77

4.1.2 Erlang Runtime System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

4.2 Web Admin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

4.3 Ad-hoc Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

4.4 Change Computer Hostname . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

5.1 Firewall Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

5.3 Erlang Cookie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

5.4 Erlang Node Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

5.5 Securing Sensible Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

6.1 How it Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87