How to setup and configure Ejabberd on EC2 AWS?

Logotype icon of ejabberd, the XMPP server

Prerequisites -

1. AWS Account
2. EC2 instance
3. Putty

Ec2 instance AMI details -

Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type — ami-00b7e666605d33085

Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS (HVM),EBS General Purpose (SSD) Volume Type. Support available from Canonical (http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/services).

1. Setup EC2 instance

Get your Ec2 instance running as you usually do. I have mentioned AMI details above which was used by me.

2. Login to your EC2 instance with Putty.

3. Install Ejabberd

sudo apt-get -y install ejabberd

Note- If you get any error like “package not found” then run sudo apt-get update and try the above command again.

4. Edit Config File to setup admin user and host

sudo vi /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.yml

Make below changes in the config file

Note — Be very careful while editing the ‘yml’ file as it has indent based syntax.

hosts:

- “localhost”

acl:

##

## The ‘admin’ ACL grants administrative privileges to XMPP accounts.

## You can put here as many accounts as you want.

##

admin:

user:

• “admin”: “localhost”

4. Restart Ejabberd

sudo service ejabberd restart

5. Now register your admin user

sudo ejabberdctl register <username> <host> <password>

E.g

sudo ejabberdctl register admin localhost eja123

6. Make sure you have opened ports 5222 and 5280 on AWS for your EC2 instance from its security group.

7. Login to Admin Console Panel

1. Visit https://<your-ip-address>:5280/admin/ in your browser

2. Username — <username>@<host> E.g admin@localhost

3. Password — <password you set while registering>

That’s it, If you see console panel you have completed your setup.

Extra Points -

1. If you mess up your installation or if you mess up while editing your config file and you are not able to revert your changes. Then simply remove Ejabberd and try again from step 1.

To remove Ejabberd run following commands

sudo apt-get purge ejabberd

sudo apt-get autoremove

2. Other useful commands

sudo service ejabberd <start/stop/status>

OR

sudo ejabberdctl <start/stop/status>

3. To check Ejabberd Version

sudo ejabberdctl status

Anonymous Login Support (as well as authenticated login)-

sudo vi /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.yml

Make below changes in the config file

auth_method: internal

host_config:

“localhost”:

auth_method:

- internal

- anonymous

anonymous_protocol: sasl_anon

allow_multiple_connections: false

To Enable History -

mod_mam:

default: always