Install ejabberd on macOS

Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS that aims to port the many Unix & Linux software that is not easily available or compatible. Homebrew installation is simple and the instruction is available on its website.

Check also the guide for Installing ejabberd development environment on OSX

The ejabberd configuration included in Homebrew's ejabberd has as default domain localhost, and has already granted administrative privileges to the account admin@localhost.

1. Once you have Homebrew installed, open Terminal. Run

   brew install ejabberd
   

   This should install the latest or at most the one-before-latest version of ejabberd. The installation directory should be reported at the end of this process, but usually the main executable is stored at /usr/local/sbin/ejabberdctl.

2. Start ejabberd in interactive mode, which prints useful messages in the Terminal.

   /usr/local/sbin/ejabberdctl live
   

3. Create the account admin@localhost with password set as password:

   /usr/local/sbin/ejabberdctl register admin localhost password
   

4. Now you can go to the web dashboard at http://localhost:5280/admin/ and fill the username field with the full account JID, for example admin@localhost, then fill the password field with that account's password.

5. Without configuration there's not much to see here, therefore the next step is to get to know how to configure ejabberd.