synapse/README.rst

About

Matrix is an ambitious new ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP[1].

Matrix specifies a set of pragmatic RESTful HTTP JSON APIs as an open standard, providing:

• Creating and managing fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure
• Eventually-consistent cryptographically secure[2] synchronisation of room state across a global open network of federated servers and services
• Sending and receiving extensible messages in a room with (optional) end-to-end encryption[3]
• Inviting, joining, leaving, kicking, banning room members
• Managing user accounts (registration, login, logout)
• Using 3rd Party IDs (3PIDs) such as email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook accounts to authenticate, identify and discover users on Matrix.
• Placing 1:1 VoIP and Video calls (in development)

These APIs are intended to be implemented on a wide range of servers, services and clients, letting developers build messaging and VoIP functionality on top of the entirely open Matrix ecosystem rather than using closed or proprietary solutions. The hope is for Matrix to act as the building blocks for a new generation of fully open and interoperable messaging and VoIP apps for the internet.

Synapse is a reference "homeserver" implementation of Matrix from the core development team at matrix.org, written in Python/Twisted for clarity and simplicity. It is intended to showcase the concept of Matrix and let folks see the spec in the context of a codebase and let you run your own homeserver and generally help bootstrap the ecosystem.

In Matrix, every user runs one or more Matrix clients, which connect through to a Matrix homeserver which stores all their personal chat history and user account information - much as a mail client connects through to an IMAP/SMTP server. Just like email, you can either run your own Matrix homeserver and control and own your own communications and history or use one hosted by someone else (e.g. matrix.org) - there is no single point of control or mandatory service provider in Matrix, unlike WhatsApp, Facebook, Hangouts, etc.

Synapse ships with two basic demo Matrix clients: webclient (a basic group chat web client demo implemented in AngularJS) and cmdclient (a basic Python commandline utility which lets you easily see what the JSON APIs are up to).

We'd like to invite you to take a look at the Matrix spec, try to run a homeserver, and join the existing Matrix chatrooms already out there, experiment with the APIs and the demo clients, and let us know your thoughts at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues or at matrix@matrix.org.

Thanks for trying Matrix!

[1] VoIP currently in development

[2] Cryptographic signing of messages isn't turned on yet

[3] End-to-end encryption is currently in development

Quick Start

The basics you need to know about Matrix are:

• Chatrooms look like #matrix:matrix.org or #test:localhost:8080
• Matrix user IDs look like @matthew:matrix.org (although in the future you will normally refer to yourself and others using a 3PID: email address, phone number, etc rather than manipulating matrix user IDs)
• To simply play with an existing homeserver (e.g. matrix.org), you can just go straight to http://matrix.org/alpha, specify a homeserver (defaults to matrix.org) and sign up and use it. (Sign-up security is currently work-in-progress)
• To run your own private homeserver on localhost:8080, install synapse with python setup.py develop --user and then run one with python synapse/app/homeserver.py
• To run your own webclient: cd webclient; python -m SimpleHTTPServer and hit http://localhost:8000 in your web browser (a recent Chrome, Safari or Firefox for now, please...)
• For now, register some accounts like @testing:localhost:8080 from different browsers, join a room like #test:localhost:8080 and have a play.
• To quickly run a public homeserver that can exchange messages with other homeservers and participate in the overall Matrix federation, open up port 8080 and run python synapse/app/homeserver.py --host machine.my.domain.name. Then come join #matrix:matrix.org and say hi! :)

Directory Structure

.
├── cmdclient           Basic CLI python Matrix client
├── demo                Scripts for running standalone Matrix demos
├── docs                All doc, including the draft Matrix API spec
│   ├── client-server       The client-server Matrix API spec
│   ├── model               Domain-specific elements of the Matrix API spec
│   ├── server-server       The server-server model of the Matrix API spec
│   └── sphinx              The internal API doc of the Synapse homeserver
├── experiments         Early experiments of using Synapse's internal APIs
├── graph               Visualisation of Matrix's distributed message store 
├── synapse             The reference Matrix homeserver implementation
│   ├── api                 Common building blocks for the APIs
│   │   ├── events              Definition of state representation Events 
│   │   └── streams             Definition of streamable Event objects
│   ├── app                 The __main__ entry point for the homeserver
│   ├── crypto              The PKI client/server used for secure federation
│   │   └── resource            PKI helper objects (e.g. keys)
│   ├── federation          Server-server state replication logic
│   ├── handlers            The main business logic of the homeserver
│   ├── http                Wrappers around Twisted's HTTP server & client
│   ├── rest                Servlet-style RESTful API
│   ├── storage             Persistence subsystem (currently only sqlite3)
│   │   └── schema              sqlite persistence schema
│   └── util                Synapse-specific utilities
├── tests               Unit tests for the Synapse homeserver
└── webclient           Basic AngularJS Matrix web client

Homeserver Installation

First, the dependencies need to be installed. Start by installing 'python2.7-dev' and the various tools of the compiler toolchain. N.B. synapse requires python 2.x where x >= 7

Installing prerequisites on ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential python2.7-dev libffi-dev

Installing prerequisites on Mac OS X:

$ xcode-select --install

The homeserver has a number of external dependencies, that are easiest to install by making setup.py do so, in --user mode:

$ python setup.py develop --user

You'll need a version of setuptools new enough to know about git, so you may need to also run:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip $ sudo pip install --upgrade setuptools

This will run a process of downloading and installing into your user's .local/lib directory all of the required dependencies that are missing.

Once this is done, you may wish to run the homeserver's unit tests, to check that everything is installed as it should be:

$ python setup.py test

This should end with a 'PASSED' result:

Ran 143 tests in 0.601s

PASSED (successes=143)

Running The Synapse Homeserver

In order for other homeservers to send messages to your server, it will need to be publicly visible on the internet, and they will need to know its host name. You have two choices here, which will influence the form of your matrix user IDs:

1. Use the machine's own hostname as available on public DNS in the form of its A or AAAA records. This is easier to set up initially, perhaps for testing, but lacks the flexibility of SRV.
2. Set up a SRV record for your domain name. This requires you create a SRV record in DNS, but gives the flexibility to run the server on your own choice of TCP port, on a machine that might not be the same name as the domain name.

For the first form, simply pass the required hostname (of the machine) as the --host parameter:

$ python synapse/app/homeserver.py --host machine.my.domain.name

For the second form, first create your SRV record and publish it in DNS. This needs to be named _matrix._tcp.YOURDOMAIN, and point at at least one hostname and port where the server is running. (At the current time synapse does not support clustering multiple servers into a single logical homeserver). The DNS record would then look something like:

_matrix._tcp    IN      SRV     10 0 8448 machine.my.domain.name.

At this point, you should then run the homeserver with the hostname of this SRV record, as that is the name other machines will expect it to have:

$ python synapse/app/homeserver.py --host my.domain.name --port 8448

You may additionally want to pass one or more "-v" options, in order to increase the verbosity of logging output; at least for initial testing.

For the initial alpha release, the homeserver is not speaking TLS for either client-server or server-server traffic for ease of debugging. We have also not spent any time yet getting the homeserver to run behind loadbalancers.

Running a Demo Federation of Homeservers

If you want to get up and running quickly with a trio of homeservers in a private federation (localhost:8080, localhost:8081 and localhost:8082) which you can then point a demo webclient at, simply run:

$ demo/start.sh

Running The Demo Web Client

At the present time, the web client is not directly served by the homeserver's HTTP server. To serve this in a form the web browser can reach, arrange for the 'webclient' sub-directory to be made available by any sort of HTTP server that can serve static files. For example, python's SimpleHTTPServer will suffice:

$ cd webclient
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

You can now point your browser at http://localhost:8000/ to find the client.

If this is the first time you have used the client from that browser (it uses HTML5 local storage to remember its config), you will need to log in to your account. If you don't yet have an account, because you've just started the homeserver for the first time, then you'll need to register one.

Registering A New Account

Your new user name will be formed partly from the hostname your server is running as, and partly from a localpart you specify when you create the account. Your name will take the form of:

@localpart:my.domain.here
     (pronounced "at localpart on my dot domain dot here")

Specify your desired localpart in the topmost box of the "Register for an account" form, and click the "Register" button. Hostnames can contain ports if required due to lack of SRV records (e.g. @matthew:localhost:8080 on an internal synapse sandbox running on localhost)

Logging In To An Existing Account

Just enter the @localpart:my.domain.here matrix user ID and password into the form and click the Login button.

Identity Servers

The job of authenticating 3PIDs and tracking which 3PIDs are associated with a given matrix user is very security-sensitive, as there is obvious risk of spam if it is too easy to sign up for Matrix accounts or harvest 3PID data. Meanwhile the job of publishing the end-to-end encryption public keys for Matrix users is also very security-sensitive for similar reasons.

Therefore the role of managing trusted identity in the Matrix ecosystem is farmed out to a cluster of known trusted ecosystem partners, who run 'Matrix Identity Servers' such as sydent, whose role is purely to authenticate and track 3PID logins and publish end-user public keys.

It's currently early days for identity servers as Matrix is not yet using 3PIDs as the primary means of identity and E2E encryption is not complete. As such, we're not yet running an identity server in public.

How does it all work?!

For now, please go spelunking in the docs/ directory to find out.

Building Internal API Documentation

Before building internal API documentation install spinx and sphinxcontrib-napoleon:

$ pip install sphinx
$ pip install sphinxcontrib-napoleon

Building internal API documentation:

$ python setup.py build_sphinx

Troubleshooting

fatal error: sodium.h: No such file or directory

There is a bug in PyNaCl 0.2.3 which can cause the module to fail to import. The bug is fixed in HEAD so you can work around it by checking PyNaCl out of git directly (https://github.com/pyca/pynacl) and installing it. Installing PyNaCl using pip may also work (remember to remove any other versions installed by setuputils in, for example, ~/.local/lib).