Setting up Ejabberd

For the Android app I've been developing, I've been using OpenFire as the back end for development purposes. Openfire was chosen mostly for convenience, but I didn't plan on using it for production as it costs when number of user scales up.
I did a bit of research and settled on ejabberd for my production server. Installing the server was as painless as it can get:


sudo apt-get install ejabberd


Note that this will install the ejabberd from the repository, which may not be the latest. I did grab the latest copy, but had problem install it.


After installation completes, I had to do some custom configuration.
Stop ejabberd first:


sudo /etc/init.d/ejabberd stop


Open the cfg file:


sudo vi /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg


For debugging purposes, I enabled debug log:


{loglevel, 4}


Set the admin user:


{acl, admin, {user, "ricky", "password"}},


Set the host. Since I repurposed another PC at home, I just set the host to its IP address:


{hosts, ["192.168.1.101"]},


For my application, I also needed to enable user directory search:


{mod_vcard, [{host, "search.192.168.1.101"}]},


That's it. To restart the server:


sudo /etc/init.d/ejabberd start


To view the log, you can:


tail -f /var/log/ejabberd/ejabberd.log


Another useful feature is to dump the current database: 


sudo ejabberdctl dump /tmp/ejabberd_dump


You can Google ejabberdctl command to see the exhaustive command set. 


I'm also using asmack for the client. I'll put up some other posts in the future regarding asmack.