DJabberd(3)

📦 version 0.85, in arch rolling

💜 DJabberd(3) — the manual page, but make it make sense

okay bestie, so this is the DJabberd(3) page from the Perl world (yes, perldoc, we love her) and honestly it's lowkey iconic. it's about a scalable, extensible Jabber/XMPP server. let's get into it ✨

🌈 SYNOPSIS

like, here's the whole vibe in one line:

$ djabberd --conf=config-file.conf --daemonize

that's it. that's the whole invocation. --conf for your config file, --daemonize so it goes and lives in the background like a proper main character. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION

so DJabberd was literally the answer to LiveJournal's Jabber (XMPP) server needs. no cap. they needed:

  • good performance for tons of connected users 🔥
  • ability to scale to multiple nodes
  • ability to hook into LiveJournal at all the places, not just auth

basically they wanted the swiss army knife of Jabber servers (think qpsmtpd or mod_perl), but like… none existed. in any language. 😭 and yeah, some popular Jabber servers let you do pluggable auth, but none of them let you get your hands into roster storage, vcards, avatars, presence, etc. so rude of them honestly.

so they made DJabberd. it's a Jabber server where almost everything defers to hooks implemented by plugins. it handles the core spec itself (including SSL, StartTLS, server-to-server, etc — the whole glow-up), but it does not come with any way to do authentication or storage or rosters, etc. you'll need to go pick up a plugin for those. iykyk. 🫶

and the whole point is you should be able to plop DJabberd into your existing systems / userbase with minimal pain. just find a plugin that's close (if a perfect match doesn't already exist!) and tweak. easy. ✨

ok now the important part, bestie, pay attention 👀

DJabberd is event-based so we can have really low per-connection memory requirements — smaller than is possible with a threaded jabber server. because of this, all plugins can operate asynchronously, taking as long as they want to finish their work, or to decline to the next handler. (in the meantime, while plugins wait on a response from whatever they're talking to, the DJabberd event loop continues at full speed 🏎️)

However, that's more work, so some plugins may choose to operate synchronously — but they do so with the understanding that those plugins will cause the whole server to get bogged down. if you're running a Jabber server for 5 users, you may not care that the SQLite authentication backend pauses your server for milliseconds at a time. but on a site with hundreds of thousands of connections, that wouldn't be acceptable. so yeah — watch out for those plugins. 💀

🎀 HACKING

read HookDocs.pm, read the major base classes (Authen, RosterStorage, PresenceChecker), join the mailing list, ask questions… we're here to help. genuinely. 🫶

if you want more hooks, let us know! and if we forgot one, it doesn't hurt us to add more. periodt. 💅

this module is Copyright (c) 2006 Six Apart, Ltd. All rights reserved.

you may distribute under the terms of either the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License, as specified in the Perl README file.

⭐ WARRANTY

this is free software. IT COMES WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. like, none. zero. don't come for us. 🙈

🌸 WEBSITE

visit:

http://danga.com/djabberd/

go on, click it, it's giving nostalgia 🌈

🍓 AUTHORS

  • Brad Fitzpatrick <brad@danga.com>
  • Artur Bergman <sky@crucially.net>
  • Jonathan Steinert <jsteinert@sixapart.com>

and that's the whole page bestie 💖 shoutout to <rainbow>perl v5.42.0</rainbow>, dated <pink>2025-12-14</pink> — that's the version and date, in case you were wondering. stan DJabberd(3). mwah 💋

📦 where this page comes from