Vines Server Install

These instructions install the basic Vines XMPP server. To install the full Vines stack, capable of chatting with servers, refer to the Vines Services installation guide.

$ gem install vines
$ vines init wonderland.lit
$ cd wonderland.lit && vines start

That's all there is to it. No database to setup, no web console to configure. Just three commands and we're ready to chat.

The init command creates two example users in the wonderland.lit domain: alice@wonderland.lit and arthur@wonderland.lit. Alice and Arthur are on each other's buddy lists (or rosters in XMPP terminology) so they can chat together as soon as we login with our favorite chat client.

The iChat, Adium, and Pidgin chat clients are nice to get started with because they allow us to specify a chat server host name that's different from our wonderland.lit domain, which obviously won't route with the fanciful .lit extension. Launch one of those clients and set the server name to localhost and the port to 5222. To log in, use alice@wonderland.lit with password secr3t.

Do this once more with arthur@wonderland.lit, his password is also secr3t, and we should see each user online and ready to chat.

This is a good default chat server that works right out of the box, but check out the config file documentation for more customized deployments.