How to Install Jackal on POP! OS

Jackal is a high-performance XMPP server that was built to be scalable, flexible and fully featured. It is designed in such a way that makes it easy to setup and deploy as a robust and reliable solution for modern messaging applications.

The following guide will walk you through the steps for installing Jackal on your POP! OS system.

Prerequisites

Before you start installing Jackal on your system, ensure you have the following requirements:

• POP! OS running on your system
• You have root or sudo user access to the system
• You have installed the necessary build tools such as build-essential and cmake

Step 1: Install dependencies

To run Jackal on your POP! OS system, you need to install the following dependencies:

• libuv
• libevent
• openssl
• libsasl2

To do this, run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y libuv1-dev libevent-dev openssl libsasl2-dev

Step 2: Install RocksDB

Jackal uses RocksDB as its backend storage engine. You need to install it first before proceeding to install Jackal. The easiest way to install RocksDB on POP! OS is to build it via the source code.

You can download RocksDB from the website https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/releases. Once you have downloaded it, extract the archive and navigate to the directory.

wget https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/archive/v5.17.2.tar.gz
tar -zxvf v5.17.2.tar.gz
cd rocksdb-5.17.2/

Next, we need to set up the build environment for RocksDB.

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j4
sudo make install

Step 3: Install Jackal

Now that all the prerequisites are in place, we can proceed to install the Jackal server.

First, clone the Jackal source code from GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/ortuman/jackal.git

We need to build and compile Jackal from the source code.

cd jackal
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

The above command will install Jackal to the /usr/local/bin directory. You can verify the installation by running the following command:

jackalctl version

Step 4: Configure Jackal

By default, Jackal does not have any configurations. You need to create a configuration file for it to work properly.

sudo mkdir /etc/jackal
sudo touch /etc/jackal/jackal.yaml
sudo chown -R "$USER" /etc/jackal

You can edit the configuration file using any text editor of your choice.

sudo nano /etc/jackal/jackal.yaml

# Default Server Listeners
server:
   listen_addr: "0.0.0.0:5222"
   http_listen_addr: "0.0.0.0:5280"
   certs_dir: "/etc/jackal/certs"
   http_tls: false

# Default Database Configuration.
database:
   type: "rocksdb"
   rocksdb:
     path: "/var/lib/jackal/db"
     create_if_missing: true
     bloom_filter_bits: 64
     max_open_files: 256

# Default Modules Configuration.
modules:
   spamfilter:
     enabled: true

Step 5: Start Jackal Server

To start the Jackal server, run the following command:

sudo jackalctl start

To stop the server, run the following command:

sudo jackalctl stop

To check the status of the server, run the following command:

sudo jackalctl status 

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to install Jackal on POP! OS. You can test the server by using a client like Pidgin or Gajim.