Tutorial

How To Install eJabberd XMPP Server on Ubuntu

Published on June 4, 2013

Ubuntu

By Bulat Khamitov

How To Install eJabberd XMPP Server on Ubuntu

First, we would have to spin up a Ubuntu 12.10 x64 droplet:

Next, login to your droplet via SSH as root.

Step 1 - Install eJabberd

apt-get -y install ejabberd

Step 2 - Setup Admin User

Change "password" to your own value:

ejabberdctl register admin localhost password

Give Admin Privileges

By default, hostname used by eJabberd is 'localhost', which can be modified from config file.

For our example we will call our admin user "admin@localhost" and modify the following lines in /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg:

%% Admin user
{acl, admin, {user, "admin", "localhost"}}.

%% Hostname
{hosts, ["localhost"]}.

Restart eJabberd

service ejabberd restart

Now you can navigate to your eJabberd Web Admin interface on droplet's IP address port 5280

 
http://198.199.90.115:5280/admin

The login username is user@domain ("admin@localhost" in our case):

From the web admin interface you can modify all the settings:

Adding New Users

From web admin interface, click Virtual Hosts -> localhost -> Users

You can also add a user from command line via SSH:

Now you can install a client like Pidgin to connect to XMPP:

Remember to use port 5222 to connect to your XMPP server using encryption:

Adding Users to your Buddy List

From Pidgin you can either press CTRL+B or from menu "Buddies" -> "Add Buddy" to buddies:

Your buddy would receive a friend request that they would have to authorize:

Now you will be able to communicate securely using XMPP and OTR encryption module in Pidgin:

And you are all done!

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26 Comments

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mrj936 • October 18, 2013

Thank you, that is very helpful. I hope I can also find an article that helps me integrate an already created database with ejabberd’s authentication/functions

jeelshah96 • September 30, 2016

Did you figure out a way to integrate mysql (or other external databases) onto your server?

Rajat Garg • September 22, 2017

Have you? Still looking…

deekin • February 27, 2014

Hmmm - all I have listed in my CP is this:

When I click on virtual hosts:

Virtual Hosts [Guide: Virtual Hosting] Host Registered Users Online Users

my CP doesn’t look anything like the screenshot - barebones :( - any ideas?

damonporch • March 24, 2015

For those that see his issue in the future:

You need to change the /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg file from {acl, admin, {user, “”, “localhost”}}. to {acl, admin, {user, “admin”, “localhost”}}

barkamleshnit • July 1, 2014

Thank you, very helpful…

How can i Configure ejabber On goDaddy Linux shared Hosting?

Kamal Nasser

DigitalOcean Employee

• July 1, 2014

@barkamlesh.nit: Unfortunately it’s not possible to install ejabberd on shared hosting.

pjaviercornejo • July 17, 2014

404 Error when calling from the browser

inderjeetrao • September 15, 2014

Thanks…

jainam • September 30, 2014

2 Questions:

How can I install latest version of ejabberd i.e. 14.07?
I have installed ejabberd via the above procedures and I was able to install ejabberd. However whenever I try adding a custom module for Push Notification, offline_message_hook doesn’t get called.

dummyrails • October 31, 2014

Great Tutorial! can Someone help in this query?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26669264/a-typical-sql-query-in-erlang-and-ejabberd

OEI • December 8, 2014

Good explanation :)

The weg login with @localhost did not work for me, so I added a domain as a host, then it worked.

truonguit2010 • March 15, 2015

Thank you, It is very helpful. But I cannot start Ejabberd.

adduser: Warning: The home directory `/var/lib/ejabberd' does not belong to the user you are currently creating.

How can I fix it?

Thank you.

truonguit2010 • March 15, 2015

This comment has been deleted

truonguit2010 • March 17, 2015

Hi, I cannot start Ejabberd server, please give me a hand. Thank you.

E(<0.38.0>:ejabberd_config:554) : Error reading Mnesia database spool files: The Mnesia database couldn’t read the spool file for the table ‘config’. ejabberd needs read and write access in the directory: /var/lib/ejabberd Maybe the problem is a change in the computer hostname, or a change in the Erlang node name, which is currently: ejabberd@truongps Check the ejabberd guide for details about changing the computer hostname or Erlang node name.

Joshua Mitchell • June 19, 2015

When I follow all of these steps then log into ejabberd, my credentials never work. I have tried multiple different passwords.

nyxee • October 15, 2015

this is what i get when i try apt-get -y install ejabberd

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 ejabberd : Depends: erlang-abi-15.b
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I already have erlang and rabbitmq installed and thoroughly tested

varunjoshi919 • December 14, 2015

Hi i want to install ejabbered on my linux machine but it show permission denied when i use this command /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg: ,please help me to solve this problem.Thanks in Advance.

gathole • January 12, 2016

Great tutorial :) Thanks

I have one query can you suggest me a good monitoring tool for Ejabberd so that I can do following things:

Search for users
Monitor logs and messages
Filter users
Filter undelivered messages
Server performance
etc…

jonlocke • August 4, 2016

The only problem that I have is when trying to connect to the admin panel via my browser. It says that my server isn’t sending any data. Any ideas? I would really love to get this up and running.

sealedHuman • August 20, 2016

Are you connecting to the admin panel via http or https? Try https://<droplet-ip-address>:5280/admin.

iigorr • November 3, 2016

ejabberdctl register keeps crashing on ubuntu-16-10-x64. Error message:

/usr/sbin/ejabberdctl: line 385: /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/ejabberdctl: line 366:  3189 Segmentation fault      $EXEC_CMD "$CMD"

Worked with 16.04 though.

gkelly1981 • November 17, 2016

FYI ejabberd.cfg is converted to ejabberd.yml

mdaghmechi • November 25, 2016

Hi, it is not possible to establish an OTR connection when I want to send a message by Pidgin client. The eJabberd server says: “...@localhost has requested an Off-the-Record private conversation https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/. However, you do not have a plugin to support that.”. How can I add the required plugin to support OTR?

Hemant Kumar • February 9, 2017

Not working in 16.04 , after all configuration my home page is not opening for ejabberd home with port 5280

noobsauce • May 5, 2017

Hey

Can I run eJabbered on the same server as the app eJabbered is used on? Or does it need it’s own server?

My server has 4GB Ram

trevorwhealy • September 17, 2017

eJabberd no longer uses the .cfg file mentioned in this writeup, and now uses .yml

Rajat Garg • September 22, 2017

With the package install, how can we enable mysql configuration?

ejabberd is configured to use ‘mysql’, but the following Erlang modules are not installed: ‘[mysql, mysql_auth, mysql_conn, mysql_recv]’

Any pointers?