Strophe Setup Tutorial with ejabberd and nginx

January 7, 2010

Anders Conbere has posted a lengthy tutorial on getting Strophe.js working in a proxied setup using nginx and ejabberd. If you’ve been trying to get started, this may help with what is probably the hardest part of the process.

He does a good job of laying out what the major roadblocks are to getting started:

Yesterday I set about getting my own test environment running for developing some BOSH related apps I’m working on. This turned out to be a bit of a struggle as I ran into a variety of issues that I had no idea about. The basics seem easy, install an xmpp server that supports BOSH, get a BOSH client, use it to write a test app and have at it. But there are some small details to get in the way. First is that not all web browsers support making XHR from local files (Firefox tells me this is a security issue), so you’ll need to host your development files on a local webserver. Second is that unless you want to set up a crossdomain policy (not difficult) you’ll need to have the BOSH server running on the same domain and port as your development files are being hosted.

There are three chapters with similar content in Professional XMPP Programming. Chapter 3 deals with getting an initial environment set up without proxies, using Flash to get around cross-domain restrictions. Appendix B deals specifically with setting up nginx, ejabberd, Punjab, tape, and dealing with Flash crossdomain.xml files. Chapter 13 goes into details on configuring things for load balancing or clustering with ejabberd, nginx, and Punjab.