matrix-sydent 2.6.1

Do I need to run Sydent to run my own homeserver?

Short answer: no.

Medium answer: probably not. Most homeservers and clients use the Sydent instance run by matrix.org, or use no identity server whatsoever.

Longer answer: if you want to allow user lookup via emails and phone numbers in a private federation of multiple homeservers, Sydent _might_ be useful for you. If you want your homeserver to be able to verify phone numbers via SMS and you have an API token for the OpenMarket HTTP SMS API, then Sydent might be useful for you.

Installing the system dependencies

To install Sydent’s dependencies on a Debian-based system, run:

sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev libffi-dev \
                     sqlite3 libssl-dev python3-virtualenv libxslt1-dev

From here, you can either install Sydent by using a PyPI release, or by recreating Sydent’s locked runtime environment.

Installing the latest Sydent release from PyPI

To create the virtual environment in which Sydent will run:

virtualenv -p python3 ~/.sydent
source ~/.sydent/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade setuptools

Sydent and its dependencies can be installed using pip by running:

pip install matrix-sydent

With the virtualenv activated, you can run Sydent using:

python -m sydent.sydent

git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent.git
cd sydent
poetry install --no-dev
# For development, pull in extra tools with
# poetry install

poetry run sydent

Listening for HTTPS connections

Most homeservers and clients will expect identity servers to be reachable using HTTPS.

Sydent does not currently support listening for HTTPS connection by itself. Instead, it is recommended to use a reverse proxy to proxy requests from homeservers and clients to Sydent. It is then possible to have this reverse proxy serve Sydent’s API over HTTPS.

When using a reverse proxy, it is recommended to limit the requests proxied to Sydent to ones which paths start with /_matrix/identity for security reasons.

An exception to this is Sydent’s internal replication API, see docs/replication.md.

SMS originators

Defaults for SMS originators will not be added to the generated config file, these should be added to the [sms] section of that config file in the form:

originators.<country code> = <long|short|alpha>:<originator>

Where country code is the numeric country code, or default to specify the originator used for countries not listed. For example, to use a selection of long codes for the US/Canada, a short code for the UK and an alphanumertic originator for everywhere else:

originators.1 = long:12125552368,long:12125552369
originators.44 = short:12345
originators.default = alpha:Matrix

Persistent data

By default, all data is stored in /data. To persist this to disk, bind /data to a Docker volume.

docker volume create sydent-data
docker run ... --mount type=volume,source=sydent-data,destination=/data sydent

But you can also bind a local directory to the container. However, you then have to pay attention to the file permissions.

mkdir /path/to/sydent-data
chown 993:993 /path/to/sydent-data
docker run ... --mount type=bind,source=/path/to/sydent-data,destination=/data sydent

Environment variables