Installation guide

You can install SIP chatserver in the following ways:

  1. From Debian package
  2. From tar archive
  3. From version control repository

The software runs on Debian or Ubuntu Linux, MacOSX and potentially other Unix variants supported by its main dependency sipclient version 0.4.0 available from  http://sipsimpleclient.com

Dependencies

  • sipclient (0.4.0)
  • python-sqlobject (>= 0.10.4)
  • python-pysqlite2 (>=2.5.0)

Debian package installation (stable version)

For people running Debian on i386 and amd64 architectures there is an official public repository provided by AG Projects. To use it, add these lines in /etc/apt/sources.list 

# AG Projects software
deb     http://ag-projects.com/debian unstable main
deb-src http://ag-projects.com/debian unstable main

Install the AG Projects debian software signing key: 

wget http://download.ag-projects.com/agp-debian-gpg.key
apt-key add agp-debian-gpg.key

After that, run: 

apt-get update
apt-get install sip-chatserver

From tar archive (stable version)

You must first install manually all software dependencies with the correct versions. The current stable version depends on sipclient 0.4.0 available as tar archive from  http://download.ag-projects.com/SipClient

The software can be downloaded as a tar archive from:

 http://download.ag-projects.com/ChatServer/

Extract it using tar xzvf sip-chatserver-version.tar.gz

To install the server run: 

python setup.py install

From version control repository (development version)

The source code is managed using darcs version control tool. The darcs repository can be fetched with: 

darcs get http://devel.ag-projects.com/repositories/sip-chatserver

To obtain the incremental changes after the initial get: 

cd sip-chatserver
darcs pull -a

To install the server run: 

python setup.py install

Running server

The server configuration resides in /etc/sip-chatserver. Copy /etc/sip-chatserver/config.ini.sample to etc/sip-chatserver/config.ini and edit it with the proper values.  Generate a TLS certificate and place the certificate and its key in /sip-chatserver/tls/

If you have installed the server other then from a debian package you must create a startup script based on debian/sip-chatserver.init and copy the script into your operating system startup script folder, typically /etc/init.d/.

Start the server using the init.d script, example for Debian Linux: 

/etc/init.d/sip-chatserver start

All server activity messages are logged to syslog.

Using the server

To use the server you need a SIP client with support for MSRP chat sessions. You can use  http://sipsimpleclient.com library that contains a test script for establishing MSRP sessions (sip_im_session).

To join a chat room send INVITE with MSRP media type to any SIP URI that maps to the server address. The username part of the SIP URI will me used by the server to generate a room. The room will exists as long as there is at least one participant connected.

Check the syslog messages to see the server activity related to users joining or leaving the rooms.