Begin work on post regarding Matrix-Signal bridge

content/blog/2023/synapse-signal-bridge.md

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+---
+title: Simple Signal-Matrix Bridge in Docker
+date: 2023-12-18
+# summary: 
+draft: true
+# tags: ["signal", "matrix"]
+description: Setting up a (simple) bridge between Matrix and Signal
+---  
+In September of 2023, I wrote a [post](/blog/2023/setting-up-synapse/) regarding how to set up a simple Matrix server. Personally, I think that Matrix is a cool protocol, but I don't use it much (at the time of writing). However, I love the ability to bridge chat services. Beeper, the company which has recently been in the news for developing a native Android iMessage client, originally started out bridging chat services. Whilst their service itself is proprietary (at the time of writing), the bridges they use are open source. They have a [guide](https://github.com/beeper/self-host) on how to self-host various bridges and Matrix with Ansible. I have not gotten around to learning Ansible, so I manually set up the Docker containers.  
+
+## Setup
+I have a Synapse server running in Docker on port 8007 locally. Thus, the following instructions assume that Synapse is running on port 8007. If you're running Synapse on a different port, change the port in the following commands.
+In addition, I will be using `matrix.example.com` as the server hostname.  
+1. Create a new directory for the bridge.  
+    ```
+    mkdir signal-matrix-bridge
+    cd signal-matrix-bridge
+    ```  
+2. Use your preferred text editor to create a file named `docker-compose.yml` with the following contents. Most of this configuration is taken from the [Mautrix guide](https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/general/docker-setup.html?search=&bridge=signal#docker-compose) and as detailed, ideally, the bridge and Synapse should be on the same network. As this is just a simple server that I'm not using for mission-crucial purposes, I'm not too concerned about this. I've left the comments in the file for reference.
+    ```
+    version: "3.7"
+
+    services:
+    mautrix-signal:
+        container_name: mautrix-signal
+        image: dock.mau.dev/mautrix/signal:latest
+        restart: unless-stopped
+        volumes:
+            - .:/data
+        # If you put the service above in the same docker-compose as the homeserver,
+        # ignore the parts below. Otherwise, see below for configuring networking.
+
+        # If synapse is running outside of docker, you'll need to expose the port.
+        # Note that in most cases you should either run everything inside docker
+        # or everything outside docker, rather than mixing docker things with
+        # non-docker things.
+        ports:
+            - "29328:29328"
+        # You'll also probably want this so the bridge can reach Synapse directly
+        # using something like `http://host.docker.internal:8008` as the address:
+        #extra_hosts:
+        #- "host.docker.internal:host-gateway"
+
+        # If synapse is in a different network, then add this container to that network.
+        #networks:
+        #- synapsenet
+    # This is also a part of the networks thing above
+    #networks:
+    #  synapsenet:
+    #    external:
+    #      name: synapsenet
+    ```
+3.