Table of Contents

Quickstart (to get a demo up and running)
Introduction
Features
What you will need
Development
Troubleshooting
- Conflicts with other Javascript libraries
  - Problem:
  - Solution:
Configuration
- Configuration variables

Quickstart (to get a demo up and running)¶

When you download a specific release of Converse.js there will be two minified files inside the zip file.

builds/converse.min.js
css/converse.min.css

You can include these two files inside the <head> element of your website via the script and link tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="css/converse.min.css">
<script src="builds/converse.min.js"></script>

You need to initialize Converse.js with configuration settings according to your requirements.

Please refer to the Configuration variables section further below for info on all the available configuration settings.

To configure Converse.js, put the following inline Javascript code at the bottom of your page (after the closing </body> element).

require(['converse'], function (converse) {
    converse.initialize({
        auto_list_rooms: false,
        auto_subscribe: false,
        bosh_service_url: 'https://bind.conversejs.org', // Please use this connection manager only for testing purposes
        hide_muc_server: false,
        i18n: locales.en, // Refer to ./locale/locales.js to see which locales are supported
        prebind: false,
        show_controlbox_by_default: true,
        roster_groups: true
    });
});

The index.html file inside the Converse.js repository may serve as a nice usable example.

These minified files provide the same demo-like functionality as is available on the conversejs.org website. Useful for testing or demoing.

You’ll most likely want to implement some kind of single persistent session solution for your website, where users authenticate once in your website and then stay logged in to their XMPP session upon the next page reload.

For more info on this, read: Prebinding and Single Session Support.

You might also want to have more fine-grained control of what gets included in the minified Javascript file. Read Configuration and Minification for more info on how to do that.

Introduction ¶

Even though you can connect to public XMPP servers on the conversejs.org website, Converse.js is not really meant to be a “Software-as-a-service” (SaaS) webchat.

Instead, its goal is to provide the means for website owners to add a tightly integrated instant messaging service to their own websites.

As a website owner, you are expected to host Converse.js yourself, and to do some legwork to properly configure and integrate it into your site.

The benefit in doing this, is that your users have a much more streamlined and integrated webchat experience and that you have control over the data. The latter being a requirement for many sites dealing with sensitive information.

You’ll need to set up your own XMPP server and in order to have Session Support (i.e. single-signon functionality whereby users are authenticated once and stay logged in to XMPP upon page reload) you will likely also have to add some server-side code.

The What you will need section has more information on all these requirements.

Features ¶

Off-the-record encryption ¶

Converse.js supports Off-the-record (OTR) encrypted messaging.

The OTR protocol not only encrypts your messages, it provides ways to verify the identity of the person you are talking to, plausible deniability and perfect forward secrecy by generating new encryption keys for each conversation.

In its current state, Javascript cryptography is fraught with dangers and challenges that make it impossible to reach the same standard of security that is available with native “desktop” software.

This is due to its runtime malleability, the way it is “installed” (e.g. served) and the browser’s lack of cryptographic primitives needed to implement secure crypto.

For harsh but fairly valid criticism of Javascript cryptography, read: Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful.

To get an idea on how this applies to OTR support in Converse.js, please read my thoughts on it.

For now, suffice to say that although its useful to have OTR support in Converse.js in order to avoid most eavesdroppers, if you need serious communications privacy, then you’re much better off using native software.

Sound Notifications ¶

From version 0.8.1 Converse.js can play a sound notification when you receive a message.

For more info, please see the play_sounds configuration setting.

Multilingual Support ¶

Converse.js is translated into multiple languages. The default build, converse.min.js, includes all languages.

Languages increase the size of the Converse.js significantly.

If you only need one, or a subset of the available languages, it’s better to make a custom build which includes only those languages that you need.

Chat Rooms ¶

Commands ¶

Here are the different commands that may be used in a chat room:

Event Type	When is it triggered?	Example (substitue $nickname with an actual user’s nickname)
ban	Ban a user from the chat room. They will not be able to join again.	/ban $nickname
clear	Clear the messages shown in the chat room.	/clear
deop	Make a moderator a normal participant.	/deop $nickname [$reason]
help	Show the list of available commands.	/help
kick	Kick a user out of a room. They will be able to join again.	/kick $nickname [$reason]
me	Speak in the 3rd person.	/me $message
mute	Remove a user’s ability to post messages to the room. They will still be able to observe.	/mute $nickname [$reason]
nick	Change your nickname.	/nick $nickname
op	Make a normal participant a moderator.	/op $nickname [$reason]
topic	Set the topic of the chat room.	/topic ${topic text}
voice	Allow a muted user to post messages to the room.	/voice $nickname [$reason]

What you will need ¶

An XMPP server ¶

Converse.js implements XMPP as its messaging protocol, and therefore needs to connect to an XMPP/Jabber server (Jabber is really just a synonym for XMPP).

You can connect to public XMPP servers like jabber.org but if you want to have Session Support you’ll have to set up your own XMPP server.

You can find a list of public XMPP servers/providers on xmpp.net and a list of servers that you can set up yourself on xmpp.org.

A BOSH Connection Manager ¶

Your website and Converse.js use HTTP as protocol to communicate with the webserver. HTTP connections are stateless and usually shortlived.

XMPP on the other hand, is the protocol that enables instant messaging, and its connections are stateful and usually longer.

To enable a web application like Converse.js to communicate with an XMPP server, we need a proxy in the middle that can act as a bridge between the two protocols.

The index.html file inside the

This is the job of a connection manager. A connection manager can be either a standalone application or part of an XMPP server. Popular XMPP servers such as ejabberd, prosody and openfire all include their own connection managers (but you usually have to enable them in the configuration).

Standalone connection managers also exist, see for example Punjab.

The demo on the Converse.js homepage uses a connection manager located at https://bind.conversejs.org. This connection manager is available for testing purposes only, please don’t use it in production.

Overcoming cross-domain request restrictions ¶

Lets say your domain is example.org, but the domain of your connection manager is example.com.

HTTP requests are made by Converse.js to the connection manager via XmlHttpRequests (XHR). Until recently, it was not possible to make such requests to a different domain than the one currently being served (to prevent XSS attacks).

Luckily there is now a standard called CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing), which enables exactly that. Modern browsers support CORS, but there are problems with Internet Explorer < 10.

IE 8 and 9 partially support CORS via a proprietary implementation called XDomainRequest. There is a Strophe.js plugin which you can use to enable support for XDomainRequest when it is present.

In IE < 8, there is no support for CORS.

Instead of using CORS, you can add a reverse proxy in Apache/Nginx which serves the connection manager under the same domain as your website. This will remove the need for any cross-domain XHR support.

For example:¶

Assuming your site is accessible on port 80 for the domain mysite.com and your connection manager manager is running at someothersite.com/http-bind.

The bosh_service_url value you want to give Converse.js to overcome the cross-domain restriction is mysite.com/http-bind and not someothersite.com/http-bind.

Your nginx or apache configuration will look as follows:

Nginx¶

http {
    server {
        listen       80
        server_name  mysite.com;
        location ~ ^/http-bind/ {
            proxy_pass http://someothersite.com;
        }
    }
}

Apache¶

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName mysite.com
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^/http-bind(.*) http://someothersite.com/http-bind$1 [P,L]
</VirtualHost>

Server-side authentication ¶

Prebinding and Single Session Support ¶

It’s possible to enable single-site login, whereby users already authenticated in your website will also automatically be logged in on the chat server,

This session should also persist across page loads. In other words, we don’t want the user to have to give their chat credentials every time they reload the page.

To do this you will require a BOSH server for converse.js to connect to (see the bosh_service_url under Configuration variables) as well as a BOSH client on your own server (written for example in Python, Ruby or PHP) that will do the pre-authentication before the web page loads.

Note

A BOSH server acts as a bridge between HTTP, the protocol of the web, and XMPP, the instant messaging protocol. Converse.js can only communicate via HTTP, but we need to communicate with an XMPP server in order to chat. So the BOSH server acts as a middle man, translating our HTTP requests into XMPP stanzas and vice versa.

Jack Moffitt has a great blogpost about this and even provides an example Django application to demonstrate it.

When you authenticate to the XMPP server on your backend application (for example via a BOSH client in Django), you’ll receive two tokens, RID (request ID) and SID (session ID).

The Session ID (SID) is a unique identifier for the current session. This number stays constant for the entire session.

The Request ID (RID) is a unique identifier for the current request (i.e. page load). Each page load is a new request which requires a new unique RID. The best way to achieve this is to simply increment the RID with each page load.

When you initialize converse.js in your browser, you need to pass it these two tokens. Converse.js will then use them to attach to the session you just created.

You can embed the RID and SID tokens in your HTML markup or you can do an XMLHttpRequest call to your server and ask it to return them for you.

Below is one example of how this could work. An Ajax call is made to the relative URL /prebind and it expects to receive JSON data back.

$.getJSON('/prebind', function (data) {
    converse.initialize({
        prebind: true,
        bosh_service_url: data.bosh_service_url,
        jid: data.jid,
        sid: data.sid,
        rid: data.rid
    });
);

Here’s what’s happening:

The JSON data returned from the Ajax call to example.com/prebind contains the user’s JID (jabber ID), RID, SID and the URL to the BOSH server (also called a connection manager).

These values are then passed to converse.js’s initialize method.

Note

If you want to enable single session support, you need to set prebind: true when calling converse.initialize (see ./index.html). Additionally you need to pass in valid jid, sid, rid and bosh_service_url values.

Example code for server-side prebinding ¶

PHP:

See xmpp-prebind-php by Michael Weibel and the folks from Candy chat.
Python:

See this example Django application by Jack Moffitt.

Development ¶

If you want to work with the non-minified Javascript and CSS files you’ll soon notice that there are references to a missing components folder. Please follow the instructions below to create this folder and fetch Converse’s 3rd-party dependencies.

Note

Users have reported that converse.js cannot be built on Windows. Patches to fix this are welcome.

Install the development and front-end dependencies ¶

We use development tools (Grunt and Bower) which depend on Node.js and npm (the Node package manager).

If you don’t have Node.js installed, you can download and install the latest version here.

Also make sure you have git installed. Details.

Once you have Node.js and git installed, run the following command inside the Converse.js directory:

make dev

Or alternatively, if you don’t have GNU Make:

npm install
bower update

This will first install the Node.js development tools (like Grunt and Bower) and then use Bower to install all of Converse.js’s front-end dependencies.

The front-end dependencies are those javascript files on which Converse.js directly depends and which will be loaded in the browser.

If you are curious to know what the different dependencies are:

Development dependencies:

Take a look at whats under the devDependencies key in package.json.
Front-end dependencies:

See dependencies in bower.json.

Note

After running `make dev`, you should now have a new directory components, which contains all the front-end dependencies of Converse.js. If this directory does NOT exist, something must have gone wrong. Double-check the output of `make dev` to see if there are any errors listed. For support, you can write to the mailing list: conversejs@librelist.com

With AMD and require.js (recommended)¶

Converse.js uses require.js to asynchronously load dependencies.

If you want to develop or customize converse.js, you’ll want to load the non-minified javascript files.

Add the following two lines to the <head> section of your webpage:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="converse.css">
<script data-main="main" src="components/requirejs/require.js"></script>

require.js will then let the main.js file be parsed (because of the data-main attribute on the script tag), which will in turn cause converse.js to be parsed.

Without AMD and require.js ¶

Converse.js can also be used without require.js. If you for some reason prefer to use it this way, please refer to non_amd.html for an example of how and in what order all the Javascript files that converse.js depends on need to be loaded.

Before submitting a pull request ¶

Add tests for your bugfix or feature ¶

Add a test for any bug fixed or feature added. We use Jasmine for testing.

Take a look at tests.html and spec/MainSpec.js to see how the tests are implemented.

If you are unsure how to write tests, please contact me and I’ll be happy to help.

Check that the tests pass ¶

Check that the Jasmine tests complete sucessfully. Open tests.html in your browser, and the tests will run automatically.

On the command line you can run:

grunt test

Check your code for errors or bad habits by running JSHint ¶

JSHint will do a static analysis of your code and hightlight potential errors and/or bad habits.

grunt jshint

You can run both the tests and jshint in one go by calling:

grunt check

Developer API ¶

Note

The API documented here is available in Converse.js 0.8.4 and higher. Earlier versions of Converse.js might have different API methods or none at all.

In the Converse.js API, you traverse towards a logical grouping, from which you can then call certain standardised accessors and mutators, like:

.get
.set
.add
.all
.remove

This is done to increase readability and to allow intuitive method chaining.

For example, to get a contact, you would do the following:

converse.contacts.get('jid@example.com');

To get multiple contacts, just pass in an array of jids:

converse.contacts.get(['jid1@example.com', 'jid2@example.com']);

Here follows now a breakdown of all API groupings and methods:

initialize ¶

Note

This method is the one exception of a method which is not logically grouped as explained above.

Initializes converse.js. This method must always be called when using converse.js.

The initialize method takes a map (also called a hash or dictionary) of configuration variables.

Example:

converse.initialize({
        allow_otr: true,
        auto_list_rooms: false,
        auto_subscribe: false,
        bosh_service_url: 'https://bind.example.com',
        hide_muc_server: false,
        i18n: locales['en'],
        keepalive: true,
        play_sounds: true,
        prebind: false,
        show_controlbox_by_default: true,
        debug: false,
        roster_groups: true
    });

“contacts” grouping ¶

get¶

Returns a map of attributes for a given buddy (i.e. roster contact), specified by JID (Jabber ID).

Example:

converse.contacts.get('buddy@example.com')

The map of attributes:

Attribute
ask	If ask === ‘subscribe’, then we have asked this person to be our chat buddy.
fullname	The person’s full name.
jid	The person’s Jabber/XMPP username.
requesting	If true, then this person is asking to be our chat buddy.
subscription	The subscription state between the current user and this chat buddy. Can be none, to, from or both.
id	A unique id, same as the jid.
chat_status	The person’s chat status. Can be online, offline, busy, xa (extended away) or away.
user_id	The user id part of the JID (the part before the @).
resources	The known resources for this chat buddy. Each resource denotes a separate and connected chat client.
groups	The roster groups in which this chat buddy was placed.
status	Their human readable custom status message.
image_type	The image’s file type.
image	The Base64 encoded image data.
url	The buddy’s website URL, as specified in their VCard data.
vcard_updated	When last the buddy’s VCard was updated.

“chats” grouping ¶

get¶

Returns an object/map representing a chat box (without opening or affecting that chat box).

Example:

converse.chats.get('buddy@example.com')

The returned chat box contains the following methods:

Method	Description
endOTR	End an OTR (Off-the-record) session.
get	Get an attribute (i.e. accessor).
initiateOTR	Start an OTR (off-the-record) session.
maximize	Minimize the chat box.
minimize	Maximize the chat box.
set	Set an attribute (i.e. mutator).

The get and set methods can be used to retrieve and change the following attributes:

Attribute	Description
height	The height of the chat box.
url	The URL of the chat box heading.

“tokens” grouping ¶

get¶

Returns a token, either the RID or SID token depending on what’s asked for.

Example:

converse.tokens.get('rid')

“listen” grouping ¶

Converse.js emits events to which you can subscribe from your own Javascript.

Concerning events, the following methods are available under the “listen” grouping:

on(eventName, callback):
Calling the on method allows you to subscribe to an event. Every time the event fires, the callback method specified by callback will be called.

Parameters:
- eventName is the event name as a string.
- callback is the callback method to be called when the event is emitted.
For example:
converse.listen.on('message', function (messageXML) { ... });
once(eventName, callback):
Calling the once method allows you to listen to an event exactly once.

Parameters:
- eventName is the event name as a string.
- callback is the callback method to be called when the event is emitted.
For example:
converse.listen.once('message', function (messageXML) { ... });
not(eventName, callback)
To stop listening to an event, you can use the not method.

Parameters:
- eventName is the event name as a string.
- callback refers to the function that is to be no longer executed.
For example:
converse.listen.not('message', function (messageXML) { ... });

Events ¶

Note

see also the “listen” grouping API section above.

Event Types ¶

Here are the different events that are emitted:

Event Type	When is it triggered?	Example
initialized	Once converse.js has been initialized.	`converse.on('initialized', function () { ... });`
ready	After connection has been established and converse.js has got all its ducks in a row.	`converse.on('ready', function () { ... });`
reconnect	After the connection has dropped. Converse.js will attempt to reconnect when not in prebind mode.	`converse.on('reconnect', function () { ... });`
message	When a message is received.	`converse.on('message', function (messageXML) { ... });`
messageSend	When a message will be sent out.	`converse.on('messageSend', function (messageText) { ... });`
noResumeableSession	When keepalive=true but there aren’t any stored prebind tokens.	`converse.on('noResumeableSession', function () { ... });`
roster	When the roster is updated.	`converse.on('roster', function (items) { ... });`
callButtonClicked	When a call button (i.e. with class .toggle-call) on a chat box has been clicked.	`converse.on('callButtonClicked', function (connection, model) { ... });`
chatBoxOpened	When a chat box has been opened.	`converse.on('chatBoxOpened', function (chatbox) { ... });`
chatRoomOpened	When a chat room has been opened.	`converse.on('chatRoomOpened', function (chatbox) { ... });`
chatBoxClosed	When a chat box has been closed.	`converse.on('chatBoxClosed', function (chatbox) { ... });`
chatBoxFocused	When the focus has been moved to a chat box.	`converse.on('chatBoxFocused', function (chatbox) { ... });`
chatBoxToggled	When a chat box has been minimized or maximized.	`converse.on('chatBoxToggled', function (chatbox) { ... });`
roomInviteSent	After the user has sent out a direct invitation, to a roster contact, asking them to join a room.	`converse.on('roomInvite', function (roomview, invitee_jid, reason) { ... });`
roomInviteReceived	After the user has sent out a direct invitation, to a roster contact, asking them to join a room.	`converse.on('roomInvite', function (roomview, invitee_jid, reason) { ... });`
statusChanged	When own chat status has changed.	`converse.on('statusChanged', function (status) { ... });`
statusMessageChanged	When own custom status message has changed.	`converse.on('statusMessageChanged', function (message) { ... });`
buddyStatusChanged	When a chat buddy’s chat status has changed.	`converse.on('buddyStatusChanged', function (buddy, status) { ... });`
buddyStatusMessageChanged	When a chat buddy’s custom status message has changed.	`converse.on('buddyStatusMessageChanged', function (buddy, messageText) { ... });`

Minification ¶

Minifying Javascript and CSS ¶

Please make sure to read the section Development and that you have installed all development dependencies (long story short, you can run npm install and then grunt fetch).

We use require.js to keep track of Converse.js and its dependencies and to to bundle them together in a single minified file fit for deployment to a production site.

To minify the Javascript and CSS, run the following command:

grunt minify

Javascript will be bundled and minified with require.js‘s optimization tool, using almond.

CSS is minified via cssmin.

Translations ¶

Note

Translations take up a lot of space and will bloat your minified file. At the time of writing, all the translations add about 50KB of extra data to the minified javascript file. Therefore, make sure to only include those languages that you intend to support and remove from ./locale/locales.js those which you don’t need. Remember to rebuild the minified file afterwards.

The gettext POT file located in ./locale/converse.pot is the template containing all translations and from which for each language an individual PO file is generated.

The POT file contains all translateable strings extracted from converse.js.

To make a user facing string translateable, wrap it in the double underscore helper function like so:

__('This string will be translated at runtime');

After adding the string, you’ll need to regenerate the POT file, like so:

make pot

To create a new PO file for a language in which converse.js is not yet translated into, do the following

Note

In this example we use Polish (pl), you need to substitute ‘pl’ to your own language’s code.

mkdir -p ./locale/pl/LC_MESSAGES
msginit -i ./locale/converse.pot -o ./locale/pl/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po -l pl

You can then create or update the PO file for a specific language by doing the following:

Note

In this example we use German (de), you need to substitute ‘de’ to your own language’s code.

msgmerge ./locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po ./locale/converse.pot -U

To do this for ALL languages, run:

make po

The resulting PO file is then what gets translated.

If you’ve created a new PO file, please make sure to add the following attributes at the top of the file (under Content-Transfer-Encoding). They are required as configuration settings for Jed, the Javascript translations library that we’re using.

"domain: converse\n"
"lang: de\n"
"plural_forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

Unfortunately Jed cannot use the PO files directly. We have to generate from it a file in JSON format and then put that in a .js file for the specific language.

To generate JSON from a PO file, you’ll need po2json for node.js. Run the following command to install it (npm being the node.js package manager):

npm install po2json

You can then convert the translations into JSON format:

po2json locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/converse.json

Now from converse.json paste the data as a value for the “locale_data” key in the object in the language’s .js file.

So, if you are for example translating into German (language code ‘de’), you’ll create or update the file ./locale/LC_MESSAGES/de.js with the following code:

(function (root, factory) {
    define("de", ['jed'], function () {
        return factory(new Jed({
            "domain": "converse",
            "locale_data": {
                // Paste the JSON data from converse.json here
            }
        })
    }
}(this, function (i18n) {
    return i18n;
}));

making sure to also paste the JSON data as value to the “locale_data” key.

Note

If you are adding translations for a new language that is not already supported, you’ll have to add the language path in main.js and make one more edit in ./locale/locales.js to make sure the language is loaded by require.js.

Congratulations, you’ve now succesfully added your translations. Sorry for all those hoops you had to jump through.

Troubleshooting ¶

Conflicts with other Javascript libraries ¶

Problem:¶

You are using other Javascript libraries (like JQuery plugins), and get errors like these in your browser console:

Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'xxx' from example.js

Solution:¶

First, find out which object is referred to by Object [object Object].

It will probably be the jQuery object $ or perhaps the underscore.js object _.

For the purpose of demonstration, I’m going to assume its $, but the same rules apply if its something else.

The bundled and minified default build of converse.js, converse.min.js includes within it all of converse.js’s dependencies, which include for example jQuery.

If you are having conflicts where attributes or methods aren’t available on the jQuery object, you are probably loading converse.min.js (which includes jQuery) as well as your own jQuery version separately.

What then happens is that there are two $ objects (one from converse.js and one from the jQuery version you included manually) and only one of them has been extended to have the methods or attributes you require.

Which jQuery object you get depends on the order in which you load the libraries.

There are multiple ways to solve this issue.

Firstly, make sure whether you really need to include a separate version of jQuery. Chances are that you don’t. If you can remove the separate version, your problem should be solved, as long as your libraries are loaded in the right order.

Either case, whether you need to keep two versions or not, the solution depends on whether you’ll use require.js to manage your libraries or whether you’ll load them manually.

With require.js¶

Instead of using converse.min.js, manage all the libraries in your project (i.e. converse.js and its dependencies plus all other libraries you use) as one require.js project, making sure everything is loaded in the correct order.

Then, before deployment, you make your own custom minified build that bundles everything you need.

With <script> tags¶

Take a look at non_amd.html in the converse.js repo.

It shows in which order the libraries must be loaded via <script> tags. Add your own libraries, making sure that they are loaded in the correct order (e.g. jQuery plugins must load after jQuery).

Configuration ¶

The included minified JS and CSS files can be used for demoing or testing, but you’ll want to configure Converse.js to suit your needs before you deploy it on your website.

Converse.js is passed its configuration settings when you call its initialize method.

You’ll most likely want to call the initialize method in your HTML page. For an example of how this is done, please see the bottom of the ./index.html page.

Please refer to the Configuration variables section below for info on all the available configuration settings.

After you have configured Converse.js, you’ll have to regenerate the minified JS file so that it will include the new settings. Please refer to the Minification section for more info on how to do this.

Configuration variables ¶

allow_contact_requests ¶

Default: true

Allow users to add one another as contacts. If this is set to false, the Add a contact widget, Contact Requests and Pending Contacts roster sections will all not appear. Additionally, all incoming contact requests will be ignored.

allow_muc ¶

Default: true

Allow multi-user chat (muc) in chatrooms. Setting this to false will remove the Chatrooms tab from the control box.

allow_otr ¶

Default: true

Allow Off-the-record encryption of single-user chat messages.

animate ¶

Default: true

Show animations, for example when opening and closing chat boxes.

auto_list_rooms ¶

Default: false

If true, and the XMPP server on which the current user is logged in supports multi-user chat, then a list of rooms on that server will be fetched.

Not recommended for servers with lots of chat rooms.

For each room on the server a query is made to fetch further details (e.g. features, number of occupants etc.), so on servers with many rooms this option will create lots of extra connection traffic.

auto_reconnect ¶

Default: true

Automatically reconnect to the XMPP server if the connection drops unexpectedly.

bosh_service_url ¶

Connections to an XMPP server depend on a BOSH connection manager which acts as a middle man between HTTP and XMPP.

See here for more information.

cache_otr_key ¶

Default: false

Let the OTR (Off-the-record encryption) private key be cached in your browser’s session storage.

The browser’s session storage persists across page loads but is deleted once the tab or window is closed.

If this option is set to false, a new OTR private key will be generated for each page load. While more inconvenient, this is a much more secure option.

This setting can only be used together with allow_otr = true.

Note

A browser window’s session storage is accessible by all javascript that is served from the same domain. So if there is malicious javascript served by the same server (or somehow injected via an attacker), then they will be able to retrieve your private key and read your all the chat messages in your current session. Previous sessions however cannot be decrypted.

debug ¶

Default: false

If set to true, debugging output will be logged to the browser console.

keepalive ¶

Default: true

Determines whether Converse.js will maintain the chat session across page loads.

message_carbons ¶

Default: false

Support for XEP-0280: Message Carbons

In order to keep all IM clients for a user engaged in a conversation, outbound messages are carbon-copied to all interested resources.

This is especially important in webchat, like converse.js, where each browser tab serves as a separate IM client.

Both message_carbons and forward_messages try to solve the same problem (showing sent messages in all connected chat clients aka resources), but go about it in two different ways.

Message carbons is the XEP (Jabber protocol extension) specifically drafted to solve this problem, while `forwarded_messages`_ uses stanza forwarding

expose_rid_and_sid ¶

Default: false

Allow the prebind tokens, RID (request ID) and SID (session ID), to be exposed globally via the API. This allows other scripts served on the same page to use these values.

Beware: a malicious script could use these tokens to assume your identity and inject fake chat messages.

forward_messages ¶

Default: false

If set to true, sent messages will also be forwarded to the sending user’s bare JID (their Jabber ID independent of any chat clients aka resources).

This means that sent messages are visible from all the user’s chat clients, and not just the one from which it was actually sent.

This is especially important for web chat, such as converse.js, where each browser tab functions as a separate chat client, with its own resource.

This feature uses Stanza forwarding, see also XEP 0297: Stanza Forwarding

For an alternative approach, see also `message carbons`_.

fullname ¶

If you are using prebinding, can specify the fullname of the currently logged in user, otherwise the user’s vCard will be fetched.

hide_muc_server ¶

Default: false

Hide the server input field of the form inside the Room panel of the controlbox. Useful if you want to restrict users to a specific XMPP server of your choosing.

i18n ¶

Specify the locale/language. The language must be in the locales object. Refer to ./locale/locales.js to see which locales are supported.

play_sounds ¶

Default: false

Plays a notification sound when you receive a personal message or when your nickname is mentioned in a chat room.

Inside the ./sounds directory of the Converse.js repo, you’ll see MP3 and Ogg formatted sound files. We need both, because neither format is supported by all browsers.

For now, sound files are looked up by convention, not configuration. So to have a sound play when a message is received, make sure that your webserver serves it in both formats as http://yoursite.com/sounds/msg_received.mp3 and http://yoursite.com/sounds/msg_received.ogg.

http://yoursite.com should of course be your site’s URL.

prebind ¶

Default: false

Use this option when you want to attach to an existing XMPP connection that was already authenticated (usually on the backend before page load).

This is useful when you don’t want to render the login form on the chat control box with each page load.

For prebinding to work, you must set up a pre-authenticated BOSH session, for which you will receive a JID (jabber ID), SID (session ID) and RID (Request ID).

These values (rid, sid and jid) need to be passed into converse.initialize (with the exception of keepalive, see below).

Additionally, you also have to specify a bosh_service_url.

Using prebind in connection with keepalive¶

The prebind and keepalive options can be used together.

The keepalive option caches the rid, sid and jid values (henceforth referred to as session tokens) one receives from a prebinded BOSH session, in order to re-use them when the page reloads.

However, if besides setting keepalive to true, you also set prebind to true, and you pass in valid session tokens to converse.initialize, then those passed in session tokens will be used instead of any tokens cached by keepalive.

If you set prebind to true and don’t pass in the session tokens to converse.initialize, then converse.js will look for tokens cached by keepalive.

If you’ve set keepalive and prebind to true, don’t pass in session tokens and converse.js doesn’t find any cached session tokens, then converse.js will emit an event noResumeableSession and exit.

This allows you to start a prebinded session with valid tokens, and then fall back to keepalive for maintaining that session across page reloads. When for some reason keepalive doesn’t have cached session tokens anymore, you can listen for the noResumeableSession event and take that as a cue that you should again prebind in order to get valid session tokens.

Here is a code example:

converse.on('noResumeableSession', function () {
    $.getJSON('/prebind', function (data) {
        converse.initialize({
            prebind: true,
            keepalive: true,
            bosh_service_url: 'https://bind.example.com',
            jid: data.jid,
            sid: data.sid,
            rid: data.rid
        });
    });
});
converse.initialize({
    prebind: true,
    keepalive: true,
    bosh_service_url: 'https://bind.example.com'
}));

roster_groups ¶

Default: false

If set to true, converse.js will show any roster groups you might have configured.

Note

It’s currently not possible to use converse.js to assign contacts to groups. Converse.js can only show users and groups that were previously configured elsewhere.

show_controlbox_by_default ¶

Default: false

The “controlbox” refers to the special chatbox containing your contacts roster, status widget, chatrooms and other controls.

By default this box is hidden and can be toggled by clicking on any element in the page with class toggle-controlbox.

If this options is set to true, the controlbox will by default be shown upon page load.

show_only_online_users ¶

Default: false

If set to true, only online users will be shown in the contacts roster. Users with any other status (e.g. away, busy etc.) will not be shown.

storage ¶

Default: session

Valid options: session, local.

This option determines the type of storage (localStorage or sessionStorage) used by converse.js to cache user data.

Originally converse.js used only localStorage, however sessionStorage is from a privacy perspective a better choice.

The main difference between the two is that sessionStorage only persists while the current tab or window containing a converse.js instance is open. As soon as it’s closed, the data is cleared.

Data in localStorage on the other hand is kept indefinitely.

Note

Since version 0.8.0, the use of local storage is not recommended. The statuses (online, away, busy etc.) of your roster contacts are cached in the browser storage. If you use local storage, these values are stored for multiple sessions, and they will likely become out of sync with your contacts’ actual statuses. The session storage doesn’t have this problem, because roster contact statuses will not become out of sync in a single session, only across more than one session.

use_otr_by_default ¶

Default: false

If set to true, Converse.js will automatically try to initiate an OTR (off-the-record) encrypted chat session every time you open a chat box.

use_vcards ¶

Default: true

Determines whether the XMPP server will be queried for roster contacts’ VCards or not. VCards contain extra personal information such as your fullname and avatar image.

xhr_custom_status ¶

Default: false

Note

XHR stands for XMLHTTPRequest, and is meant here in the AJAX sense (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

This option will let converse.js make an AJAX POST with your changed custom chat status to a remote server.

xhr_custom_status_url ¶

Note

XHR stands for XMLHTTPRequest, and is meant here in the AJAX sense (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

Default: Empty string

Used only in conjunction with xhr_custom_status.

This is the URL to which the AJAX POST request to set the user’s custom status message will be made.

The message itself is sent in the request under the key msg.

xhr_user_search ¶

Default: false

Note

XHR stands for XMLHTTPRequest, and is meant here in the AJAX sense (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

There are two ways to add users.

The user inputs a valid JID (Jabber ID), and the user is added as a pending contact.
The user inputs some text (for example part of a firstname or lastname), an XHR (Ajax Request) will be made to a remote server, and a list of matches are returned. The user can then choose one of the matches to add as a contact.

This setting enables the second mechanism, otherwise by default the first will be used.

What is expected from the remote server?

A default JSON encoded list of objects must be returned. Each object corresponds to a matched user and needs the keys id and fullname.

xhr_user_search_url ¶

Note

XHR stands for XMLHTTPRequest, and is meant here in the AJAX sense (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

Default: Empty string

Used only in conjunction with xhr_user_search.

This is the URL to which an AJAX GET request will be made to fetch user data from your remote server. The query string will be included in the request with q as its key.

The calendar can be configured through a data-pat-calendar attribute. The available options are:

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For example:¶

Nginx¶

Apache¶

get¶

get¶

get¶

With require.js¶

With <script> tags¶

Using prebind in connection with keepalive¶

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