This little server implements a simple REST-like HTTP interface to a buddycloud instance. At its heart, it is a proxy service that exposes the XMPP publish-subscribe nodes underlying each buddycloud channel as Atom feeds that can be both received and modified. The interface follows the Atom Publishing Protocol as much as possible.

The server is written on top of Node.js, so you need to install that first.

After getting the server's code, change to its root directory and use Node's package manager to install all other dependencies:

npm install

You can then start it by invoking

npm start

The tests are run with

npm test

The server needs to be configured for the buddycloud/XMPP server it should communicate with. See the Configuration section.

The API is described in detail at https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Buddycloud_HTTP_API.

You can configure the HTTP API server by copying config.js.example to config.js in the server's root directory and editing it as needed. The file is made up of multiple "profile" definitions of the form

exports.profileName = {
  option1: value1,
  option2: value2,
  …
};

Each profile specifies a different configuration. For exmaple, the testing profile is used by the unit tests, while development is thought as a configuration useful for local debugging. You can define as many other profiles as you want and load them by setting the NODE_ENV environment variable at startup, like so:

NODE_ENV=myprofile npm start

By default, the production profile is used.

For added convenience, every option value defined in the special "underscore profile" (_) applies to all profiles that don't explicitly override it. As an example, the following snippet tells the server to listen on port 3000 by default, but to use 3001 for the testing profile:

exports._ = {
  port: 3000
};

exports.testing = {
  post: 3001,
  …
}

The following configuration options are supported:

• debug (Optional): If true, the API server includes exception traces in "Internal Server Error" responses.
• port (Required): The port on which the server listens for HTTP requests.
• xmppDomain (Required): The XMPP domain to which the server belongs. This defines the XMPP server used for authentication and presence.
• xmppHost (Optional): The hostname of the proxied XMPP server. This is only needed if the hostname and port cannot be resolved from the xmppDomain via DNS service discovery.
• xmppPort (Optional): The proxied XMPP server's port. See above.
• xmppAnonymousDomain (Optional): The XMPP domain used for anonymous sessions. If omitted, xmppDomain is assumed to handle this case.
• xmppAnonymousHost (Optional): Like xmppHost, but for xmppAnonymousDomain.
• xmppAnonymousPort (Optional): Like xmppPort, but for xmppAnonymousDomain.
• xmppDomain (Required): The channel server's component domain.
• requestExpirationTime (Optional): Number of seconds to wait for the response to an XMPP request. The default is 60.
• sessionExpirationTime (Optional): Number of seconds before a proxied XMPP session expires. By default, this is 600 (10 minutes).
• https (Optional): If true, the server communicates exclusively via HTTPS. httpsCert and httpsKey must be specified in this case.
• httpsCert (Optional): The SSL certificate to use if https is defined.
• httpsKey (Optional): The SSL private key to use if https is defined.