Service request: Signal DBus Service

[matthew-piziak]

As described on the signal-cli Wiki.

signal-cli can run in daemon mode and provides an experimental dbus interface.

This specifically requires jni/unix-java.so, and requires a separate user and a configuration file.

The suggested manual process goes something like this:

cp data/org.asamk.Signal.conf /etc/dbus-1/system.d/
cp data/org.asamk.Signal.service /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/
cp data/signal.service /etc/systemd/system/
sed -i -e "s|%dir%|<INSERT_INSTALL_PATH>|" -e "s|%number%|<INSERT_YOUR_NUMBER>|" /etc/systemd/system/signal.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable signal.service
systemctl reload dbus.service

But it would be nice to have it packaged up as a Nix service.

[matthew-piziak]

Emacs also has a DBus interface, so with DBus and LUI it should be quite easy to create a robust and performant chat client for Signal. I don't know well enough how to package services though, so I hope that someone can help me there.

[aanderse]

@matthew-piziak Please go ahead and mention any specific issues you are having and we'll do our best to help.

[symbiont-matthew-piziak]

Thanks @aanderse! Right now I have signal-cli on an idle loop inside my Emacs process and connected up to LUI. It serves my purposes well enough so I probably won't jump on this soon. At some point I may want the additional robustness though, in which case I'll refer back to this issue as I try to get the service running. :)

[matthew-piziak]

In testing I got Missing native library dependency for dbus service: no unix-java in java.library.path.

How do I satisfy this dependency on NixOS?

[matthew-piziak]

I have pkgs.libmatthew_java installed, but it's not on the Java path. Here is how to do it on Fedora: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/wiki/Setup-on-fedora-26-with-dbus. But I don't know how to do it in NixOS.

[matthew-piziak]

I tried sudo ln -s /nix/store/c764v07frma64dnnwjniax7jmp0y54hb-libmatthew-java-0.8/lib/jni/libunix-java.so /usr/lib64/libunix-java.so as per this page but it didn't help.

Is there a way I can run the signal-cli executable where I add the nix path to the -Djava.library.path?

[matthew-piziak]

I tried adding libmatthew_java to signal-cli's PATH like so:

installPhase = ''
      mkdir -p $out/bin
      cp -r lib $out/lib
      cp bin/signal-cli $out/bin/signal-cli
      wrapProgram $out/bin/signal-cli \
      --prefix PATH : ${lib.makeBinPath [ pkgs.jre_headless pkgs.libmatthew_java ]} \
      --set JAVA_HOME ${pkgs.jre_headless}
    '';

But I get the same error when trying to run signal-cli as daemon. @aanderse do you have any idea of what I could be doing wrong?

[matthew-piziak]

I tried the following derivation,

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
  signal-cli = pkgs.signal-cli.overrideAttrs (attrs: {
    buildInputs = with pkgs; [ makeWrapper libmatthew_java ];
    installPhase = ''
      mkdir -p $out/bin
      cp -r lib $out/lib
      cp bin/signal-cli $out/bin/signal-cli
      export JAVA_OPTS='-Djava.library.path ${lib.makeBinPath [ pkgs.libmatthew_java ]}'
      wrapProgram $out/bin/signal-cli \
        --prefix PATH : ${lib.makeBinPath [ pkgs.jre_headless ]} \
        --set JAVA_HOME ${pkgs.jre_headless}
    '';
  });
in {
  environment.systemPackages = [ signal-cli ]
    ++ (with pkgs; [ qrencode shared-mime-info signal-desktop ]);
}

…but it fails with

Error: Could not find or load main class .nix.store.h763fyxacqas0xc40b1i08dxq0dy9c07-libmatthew-java-0.8.bin

[matthew-piziak]

I've broken out the specific signal-cli daemon bug into a separate issue: #72737

[stale]

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[kcghost]

This is important to me!

It would be nice if this functionality worked out of the box. I'm not certain how to manually start the daemon either. There might be a new issue since this was last discussed? I get the following error:

signal-cli -u +(phone_number) daemon
ERROR DaemonCommand - Dbus command failed
org.freedesktop.dbus.exceptions.DBusException: Failed to connect to bus: Failed to auth
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.AbstractConnection.<init>(AbstractConnection.java:166)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.impl.DBusConnection.<init>(DBusConnection.java:334)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.impl.DBusConnection.getConnection(DBusConnection.java:149)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.impl.DBusConnection.getConnection(DBusConnection.java:169)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.impl.DBusConnection.getConnection(DBusConnection.java:228)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.impl.DBusConnection.getConnection(DBusConnection.java:184)
	at org.asamk.signal.commands.DaemonCommand.handleCommand(DaemonCommand.java:66)
	at org.asamk.signal.App.handleLocalCommand(App.java:204)
	at org.asamk.signal.App.init(App.java:164)
	at org.asamk.signal.Main.main(Main.java:49)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to auth
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.transports.AbstractTransport.authenticate(AbstractTransport.java:114)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.transports.UnixSocketTransport.connect(UnixSocketTransport.java:69)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.transports.TransportFactory.createTransport(TransportFactory.java:44)
	at org.freedesktop.dbus.connections.AbstractConnection.<init>(AbstractConnection.java:161)
	... 9 more
Dbus command failed

[matthew-piziak]

@kcghost I went back to using non-daemon commands on a loop because of that issue. Tracking here: AsamK/signal-cli#315

[matthew-piziak]

Reproduced on signal-cli 0.9.2