Salty IM

Quick Start

$ go install go.mills.io/saltyim/cmd/salty-chat@latest
$ salty-chat make-user user@domain
$ salty-chat chat prologic@mills.io

NOTE:

As of 19th March 2022 15:42 AEST some of the below documentation is now out-of-date and will be updated soon as well as the landing page salty.im

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A rudimentary terminal / command-line based chat system using the salty command-line tool for encrypting and decrypting messages using the saltpack message format and using msgbus as transport.

Requirements

• You need a POSIX Shell, e.g: /bin/sh
  • You also need jq installed (the script uses this to parse the JSON from Discovery requests)
• msgbus
• salty

If you have Go installed:

$ go install git.mills.io/prologic/msgbus/cmd/msgbus@latest
$ go install go.mills.io/salty/cmd/salty@latest
$ go install go.mills.io/salty/cmd/salty-keygen@latest

Quick Start

export MSGBUS_URI=https://msgbus.<yourdomain>
$ ./salty-chat read &
$ ./salty-chat chat prologic@mills.io

NB: You need to ensure you have a valid msgbus Endpoint for salt-chat to work. See Endpoint for details.

Setup

SKip this section if you ran salty-chat make-user

Keys

To generate your Private / Public keys:

$ salty-keygen -o $HOME/.config/salty/$USER.key

Setup an environment variable in your shell to point SALTY_IDENTITY to $HOME/.config/salty/$USER.key. For example:

export SALTY_IDENTITY="$HOME/.config/salty/$USER.key"

Inbox

To ensure you are reading from your own Inbox by default use: export SALTY_INBOX="username"

Endpoint

First you need to setup msgbus somewhere, see that project for details on how to set this up. Or you can just use the instance I run at https://msgbus.mills.io/ (just please don't abuse it!)

Point an environment variable called MSGBUS_URI to your msgbus instance.

Example:

export MSGBUS_URI=https://msgbus.mills.io

NB: You are welcome to use my (James Mills) msgbus instance above but please don't abuse it!

Discovery

Create a JSON file called <user>.json and place it at the root of your domain on a path like /.well-known/salty/user.json. The conents of which are:

{
  "endpoint": "https://msgbus.mills.io",
  "topic": "prologic",
  "key": "kex1ekt5cru4vs42wnaxppkjn5pexmt2w6uxx9z2mz0fqeuc80e0g9gsggs8ah"
}

You can see an example of prologic@mills.io

Usage

Start a Chat

$ ./salty-chat chat prologic@mills.io
>

Sending a Message

$ ./salty-chat send prologic@mills.io Test
2022/03/17 01:46:14 Reading message from stdin...

Receiving your Messages

$ ./salty-chat read
INFO[0000] successfully connected to wss://msgbus.mills.io/prologic
# signed by: kex1ekt5cru4vs42wnaxppkjn5pexmt2w6uxx9z2mz0fqeuc80e0g9gsggs8ah
[2022-03-17T01:23+10:00] <prologic> Test
# signed by: kex1ekt5cru4vs42wnaxppkjn5pexmt2w6uxx9z2mz0fqeuc80e0g9gsggs8ah
[2022-03-17T01:46+10:00] <prologic> Test

Infrastructure Setup:

• As mentioned earlier you will need a static site generator or webserver to serve your .well-known json file. This can be setup in numerous ways, but we will be providing bootstrapping instructions in the infrastructure folder.
• You'll also need to use a msgbus to make this work as it brokers the encrypted payload between users on SaltyIm. This will also live in infrastructure

License

salty-msgbus-chat is licensed under the terms of the WTFPL license.