docs.ejabberd.im

Getting started with ejabberd

Overview

ejabberd is the de facto XMPP server in the world. The fact that it is used to power the largest deployments in the world should not intimidate you. ejabberd is equally suitable for small instances.

ejabberd has been designed from the ground-up, since 2002 for robust, enterprise deployment. The goal has always been to shoot for the moon and this is what made it a long-lasting success.

ejabberd is specifically designed for enterprise purposes: it is fault-tolerant, can utilise the resources of multiple clustered machines, and can easily scale when more capacity is required (by just adding a box/VM).

Designed at a moment when clients were mostly desktops that only supported a kind of HTTP polling call BOSH, the project managed to adapt to recent changes by introducing support for WebSockets, BOSH improvements, and a solid mobile stack.

It was developed at a time when XMPP was still known as "Jabber", but quickly adopted an evolution process in order to support the various versions of XMPP RFCs. It now encourages innovation and experimentation by supporting most, if not all, extensions produced by the XSF.

ejabberd relies on a dynamic community all over the world. To get an idea of existing contributions, you can check ejabberd main repository or the repository containing a great amount of contributed extensions.

This is possible thanks to a modular architecture based on a core router and an extremely powerful plugin mechanism that is getting richer every day.

Welcome to the beginning of your journey of ejabberd mastery!

Options to use ejabberd

ejabberd can be used in different ways. The most common one is to use ejabberd Community Edition. This is the standard Open Source version that everyone loves: highly scalable and flexible.

Fortunately, if you need more than just the ejabberd platform software, ProcessOne can help you with a commercial offering. Commercial offering come in two type of packaging:

  • ejabberd Business Edition, including features for large companies (enhanced geodistributed companies and mobile support to develop own, rich clients) and world-class support, that can please even the most demanding businesses, with 24/7 options.
  • ejabberd SaaS being a way to access and benefit of all the features of ejabberd Business Edition at an attractive and scalable price. ejabberd SaaS allows you to keep control of your data thanks to integration API you can implement on your backend to become a data provider for ejabberd SaaS.

Whatever approach you choose, you can hardly make the wrong choice with ejabberd! In every case you can easily integrate ejabberd with your existing application using:

Architecture of an ejabberd service

ejabberd brings configurability, scalability and fault-tolerance to the core feature of XMPP – routing messages.

Its architecture is based on a set of pluggable modules that enable different features, including:

  • One-to-one messaging
  • Store-and-forward (offline messages)
  • Contact list (roster) and presence
  • Groupchat: MUC (Multi-User Chat)
  • Messaging archiving with Message Archive Management (MAM)
  • User presence extension: Personal Event Protocol (PEP) and typing indicator
  • Privacy settings, through privacy list and simple blocking extensions
  • User profile with vCards
  • Full feature web support, with BOSH and websockets
  • Stream management for message reliability on mobile (aka XEP-0198)
  • Message Delivery Receipts (aka XEP-184)
  • Last activity
  • Metrics and full command-line administration
  • and many many more.

The full list of supported protocol and extensions is available on Protocols Supported by ejabberd page.

This modular architecture allows high customisability and easy access to the required features.

ejabberd enables authenticating users using external or internal databases (Mnesia, SQL), LDAP or external scripts. It also allows connecting anonymous users, when required.

For storing persistent data, ejabberd uses Mnesia (the distributed internal Erlang database), but you can opt for SQL database like MySQL or PostgreSQL

And of course, thanks to its API, ejabberd can be customised to work with a database chosen by the customer.

Deploying and managing an ejabberd service

ejabberd can be deployed for a number of scenarios fitting end-user / developer / customer needs. The default installation setup consists of a single ejabberd node using Mnesia, so it does not require any additional configuration. This primary system is sufficient for fast deployment and connecting XMPP clients. It should be good enough for most of the small deployments (and even medium ones).

A more scalable solution would be deploying ejabberd with an external database for persistent data. As Mnesia is caching part of its data in ejabberd memory (actually in Erlang VM node), this kind of setup make your system more scalable and typically easier to integrate with your usual database. As a sysadmin, yes, you can use your standard backup process.

Those larger setup can run as a cluster of ejabberd nodes. This is a clustering mode where all nodes are active, so it can be use for fault-tolerance, but also to increase the capacity of your ejabberd deployment.

With such a deployment you can load balance the traffic to your cluster node using one of the following solution:

  • traditional TCP/IP load balancer (beware of the cost of your solution, typical XMPP connections are persistent).
  • DNS load balancing.
  • Custom approach that requires client cooperation.

If deployed on a 16 GB RAM machine with at least 4 cores, a single ejabberd node can typically handle 200-300 K online users. This setup is suitable for systems with up to 10 nodes.

Note that your mileage may vary depending on your use case, the feature your are using and how clean the architecture design and the client is developed. That's why, if you plan to reach huge volume, it is recommended to start asking advices from day 1 to an ejabberd expert. Initial mistakes in the solution design are harder to fix once the project is in production.

If the service requires a cluster of more than 10 nodes, we recommend not relying on Mnesia clustering mode. Many solutions are available, the easiest and more inexpensive being to rely on ejabberd Software-as-a-Service approach.

ejabberd also allows connecting different clusters as parts of larger systems. This is a standard XMPP feature call server-to-server (aka s2s in XMPP lingo). It is used in geo-localised services handling massive traffic from all over the world. Special extension are also available from ProcessOne to handle geodistribution in an even more robust way.

To manage the users, rosters, messages and general settings, we provide a command-line tool, ejabberdctl. That command-line allows you to gather metrics from ejabberd to be able to monitor what is happening in your system, understand and even anticipate issues.

The main benefit of ejabberd is the ability to reach a command-line to type Erlang commands. This allows you to fix and troubleshoot most of the tricky situation and even update and reload code without stopping the service. This is a life saver for your uptime.

Welcome to the benefit of Erlang hot-code swapping!

ejabberd is more than XMPP

Thanks to the modular architecture of ejabberd, the platform is becoming a core component for messaging applications.

Messaging applications require to transfer more than text messages. ejabberd has grow a full set of media related features that makes ejabberd a great choice to support voice and video applications, but also to proxy various kind of media transfer (images, audio and video files for example).

As such, ejabberd support:

  • Jingle, XMPP based voice protocol
  • SIP (Session Initiation Protocol): Yes, you can pass SIP calls using ejabberd :)
  • ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment: A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT) Traversal)
  • STUN
  • TURN
  • Proxy65 media relay

This makes ejabberd the best XMPP server to support SIP and WebRTC based communication tools.

Helping us in the development process

With thousands of more or less official forks, the core ejabberd team, supported by ProcessOne, is constantly monitoring and reviewing improvements. We use our 15 years of experience to filter the best ideas or improvements to make sure ejabberd is always your most solid choice in term of scalability, robustness and manageability.

The best way to start developing for ejabberd is to clone, watch and star the project, to get in touch on our developer chatroom (ejabberd@conference.process-one.net) or to join ejabberd community on StackOverflow.