What Is The Matrix Protocol And How To Install It

Here we will show you how you can install Matrix on your server.

What Is the Matrix Protocol?

At its core, Matrix is a set of protocols that define how messages are sent over the internet. Similar to HTTP, Matrix aims to be an open standard that promotes free and transparent sharing of information online. It does so by doing two things:

The core protocol team provides an open source server that you can create and deploy for clients and users to connect to. This also serves as the reference for third-party developers when creating their own software.These servers, in turn, are made to communicate with each other. This means that you can talk to other users even if they are on a different server than you.

Why Use the Matrix Protocol?

One of the main selling points of Matrix is that it allows you to create a network of servers that can seamlessly talk to each other in real time. This is similar to technologies such as Email, IRC and Pleroma. In that, you can create a server for yourself and instantly connect with the wider world. This can be incredibly helpful if you want to be able to control your own data when communicating online. Further, this model of communication is also highly resilient and secure. Being able to have your own server gives you the ability to maintain service even if parts of the larger network goes down. Not only that, this also ensures that only you can access the accounts and messages that are in your server.

Hosting Your Own Matrix Server

The easiest way to use Matrix is by hosting your own server. However, it is important to note that Matrix will need a number of things before you can install and use it:

First, you need to have a domain name for your instance. This is because, Synapse, the server that you are going to use needs a Fully Qualified Domain Name to function.You also need a machine that you can access from outside your network. This can be a PC in your home that has a proper Static IP address or a VPS that you rent online.Lastly, if you intend to installl Synapse on a VPS, you need to make sure that you have root access for that machine. This is because Synapse depends on a number of system packages to function properly.

Knowing all this, this guide will focus on setting up Synapse in a Debian VPS from Digitalocean. Let’s get started.

1. Installing Synapse

Login to your VPS instance and download all of the dependencies for Synapse: By default, Debian does not include the official Synapse packages in its repositories. You will have to import the Synapse repository to your server. With that done, you can now install Synapse through apt: Synapse will ask for a couple of things during the installation.

2. Set Up Synapse

Once Synapse is installed, the next thing that you need to do is to setup a reverse proxy with nginx. Doing this will allow you to access Synapse from outside the local machine. This works by using the Nginx webserver to listen for incoming traffic and forwarding it to a different port in the system.

The server_name points to the domain name that you are using. In my case, I used “yetanothermatrixserver.xyz” as my server_name.The two listen commands tell Nginx where to look for incoming connections. The first line looks for IPv4 connections while the second one looks for IPv6.The three location blocks indicate what Nginx will do for the specific paths that a user might request. For example, the first location block tells Nginx to automatically redirect traffic to port 8008. While the latter location block handles the ACME challenge for SSL.

3. Set Up SSL for Synapse

With that done, the next thing that you need to do is to setup encryption. By default, Synapse does not do SSL by itself, but you can easily set up SSL with Let’s Encrypt.

4. Create an User Account in Synapse

Now you can now create your first user account in Synapse. In order to do that, you need to do two things:

create a pre-shared secretrun the user creation script.

Knowing that, it is relatively simple to create a pre-shared secret. This is a random string of characters that you need to place in your Synapse configuration file. This, in turn, allows you to create and remove accounts from your VPS’ command line. The last thing that you need to do is to create the user account itself. Congratulations! You now have a basic working installation of Synapse. From here, you can now login to your server through a web client such as Element. On the other hand, you can also use either a desktop or a mobile client such as Ditto. Image credit: Message speech bubble symbol by 123RF One important thing to note, however, is that doing it this way means that the server will not check whether the user is a real human or not. In order to do that, you need to either use CAPTCHA or email for Synapse to send out confirmation emails.