Signal-Server Full Installation Guide

• Roadmap! New readers probably start here
• Written for Signal-Server v9.81.0
• Documented with a Debian / Ubuntu EC2 instance in mind

Dependencies

Required:

• git
• java
• docker
• docker-compose

Optional:

• maven (v3.8.6 or newer)
  • If on Debian, you may need to manually install a newer version

Pre-Compilation

Signal-Server needs to be ran in an AWS EC2 instance for it to function. While you can configure locally and scp your files into the instance, this is a pain

• Create an account with AWS, then follow these sections about making an EC2 instance and associating an elastic ip

Compilation

The easy way

git clone https://github.com/jtof-dev/Signal-Server.git
cd Signal-Server/scripts
# now choose surgery-compiler.sh or main-compiler.sh, though surgery-compiler is the one that will work currently
bash surgery-compiler.sh

Using the scripted compilers are recommended to ensure that the server is in the correct configuration (with or without zkgroup)

Manually

• If you want to pull from signalapp's repo, you can run git clone https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server (mileage may vary on configuring a newer version), and if you want to specify v9.81.0, also run git checkout 9c93d37

Then compile with:

./mvnw clean install -DskipTests -Pexclude-spam-filter

Which uses the maven build script that comes bundled with Signal-Server. You can also install your own instance of maven and build using that:

mvn clean install -DskipTests -Pexclude-spam-filter

Removing zkgroup dependencies manually

• This removes zkgroup (originally called from libsignal) which will let the server start

• In WhisperServerService.java, comment out lines 639, 739-40, 773-777

• Alternatively, copy the WhisperServerService.java file from either the folder intact or post-surgery to service/src/main/java/org/whispersystems/textsecuregcm to either include or remove zkgroup

Configuration

Fill out sample.yml and sample-secrets-bundle.yml, located in service/config/

• Any configuration notes related to these two .yml files are located here

Docker configuration

Note: this is only for docker containers bundled in Signal-Server, there are some other docker dependencies - check out Other Self-Hosted Services

In order to for the redis-cluster to successfully start, it has to start without any modifications to the source docker-compose.yml

The easy way

cd scripts
bash docker-compose-first-run.sh

Note: this will delete any existing redis-cluster volumes generated in the Signal-Server folder

Manually

Check out this README in Signal-Docker

Starting the server

The easy way

Make sure you configure the repo for quickstart.sh first!

cd scripts
bash quickstart.sh

Manually

Call your environmental variables (if not in .bashrc)

Make sure your AWS environmental variables are sorted out

Run redis:

sudo docker-compose up -d

Start the server with:

java -jar -Dsecrets.bundle.filename=service/config/sample-secrets-bundle.yml service/target/TextSecureServer-9.81.0.jar server service/config/sample.yml

Running the server

To ping the server, try this command (or any of the ones listed when starting the server)

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/accounts/whoami

When running Signal-Server in a Docker container, replace port 8080 with port 7006

Other Self-Hosted Services

Once you get the server running without errors in EC2, there are a couple other services you need to set up

• NGINX and Certbot to handle SSL certificates

  • NGINX needs to be done first to generate certificates which will be used while configuring registration-service

• Signalapp's registration-service to handle registering phone numbers

Recloning

The recloner.sh bash script moves the folder personal-config up one level outside of Signal-Server, then reclones from this repository

• This is useful when a compilation fails, but hopefully everything is streamlined so you don't run into this (usually you can just git pull and call it a day)

cd scripts
bash recloner.sh

Connecting the server to an Android app

• Check out jtof-dev/Signal-Android!

To-Do

General

Running the server

• Make EC2 role and policy narrower

• Make the account crawler wait longer between runs

• Fix the redis-cluster error (doesn't show up every time but it complains about null values)

Extra Credit

• Write scripts for AWS / Google Cloud cli