Introduction

Matrix is an ambitious new ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP. The basics you need to know to get up and running are:

• Chatrooms are distributed and do not exist on any single server. Rooms can be found using names like #matrix:matrix.org or #test:localhost:8008 or they can be ephemeral.
• 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)

The overall architecture is:

client <----> homeserver <=====================> homeserver <----> client
       https://matrix.org/_matrix      https://mydomain.net/_matrix

Quick Start

To get up and running:

• To simply play with an existing homeserver you can just go straight to http://matrix.org/alpha.
• To run your own private homeserver on localhost:8008, install synapse with python setup.py develop --user and then run one with python synapse/app/homeserver.py - you will find a webclient running at http://localhost:8008 (use a recent Chrome, Safari or Firefox for now, please...)
• To make the homeserver public and let it exchange messages with other homeservers and participate in the overall Matrix federation, open up port 8448 and run python synapse/app/homeserver.py --host machine.my.domain.name. Then come join #matrix:matrix.org and say hi! :)

For more detailed setup instructions, please see further down this document.

About Matrix

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

• Creating and managing fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure
• Eventually-consistent cryptographically secure[1] 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[2]
• 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

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] Cryptographic signing of messages isn't turned on yet

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

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

If you don't have access to github, then you may need to install syutil manually by checking it out and running python setup.py develop --user on it too.

If you get errors about sodium.h being missing, you may also need to manually install a newer PyNaCl via pip as setuptools installs an old one. Or you can check 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).

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)

Upgrading an existing homeserver

Before upgrading an existing homeserver to a new version, please refer to UPGRADE.rst for any additional instructions.

Setting up Federation

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 \
    --server-name machine.my.domain.name \
    --config-path homeserver.config \
    --generate-config
$ python synapse/app/homeserver.py --config-path homeserver.config

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 \
    --server-name YOURDOMAIN \
    --bind-port 8448 \
    --config-path homeserver.config \
    --generate-config
$ python synapse/app/homeserver.py --config-path homeserver.config

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 access through the webclient running at http://localhost:8080. Simply run:

$ demo/start.sh

Running The Demo Web Client

The homeserver runs a web client by default at http://localhost:8080.

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.

Where's the spec?!

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