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<h1 id="telodendria">Telodendria</h1>
<p>
<b>Telodendria:</b> The terminal branches of an axon.
</p>
<p>
<b><i>Note:</i></b> <b>Telodendria</b> is under <i>heavy</i> development.
Please see the <a href="#project-status">Project Status</a>.
</p>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is a Matrix homeserver implementation written from
scratch in ANSI C. It is designed to be lightweight and simple, yet
functional. <b>Telodendria</b> differentiates itself from other Matrix
homeserver implementations because it:
<ul>
<li>
Is written in C, a stable, low-level programming language with a long
history, low build and runtime overhead, and wide compatibility.
</li>
<li>
Is written with minimalism as a primary design goal. Whenever possible
and practical, no third-party libraries are pulled in to the source
code. Everything <b>Telodendria</b> needs is custom written. As a
result, <b>Telodendria</b> depends only on a standard C compiler and
library to be built, and only a web server with CGI capabilities to
run.
</li>
<li>
Uses a flat-file directory structure to store data instead of a
database. This has a number of advantages:
<ul>
<li>It makes setup and maintenance much easier.</li>
<li>
It allows <b>Telodendria</b> to run on systems with fewer resources.
</li>
<li>
It provides both runtime and data safety and stability. Since no
database is running, there's fewer things that could go wrong because
there's a lot less code running on the system.
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
Runs as a CGI application. <b>Telodendria</b> is delivered as a single
small, highly-optimized binary that can be dropped in a web server's
web root to be executed. This allows it to consume very few resources
and be very easy to set up.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is on Matrix! Check out the official Matrix rooms:
</p>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Room</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>#telodendria-releases:bancino.net</code>
</td>
<td>
Get notified of new releases.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>#telodendria-general:bancino.net</code>
</td>
<td>
General discussion and support for <b>Telodendria</b>.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>#telodendria-issues:bancino.net</code>
</td>
<td>
Report issues with <b>Telodendria</b>.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<code>#telodendria-patches:bancino.net</code>
</td>
<td>
Submit code patches to the <b>Telodendria</b> project.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2 id="table-of-contents">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="#telodendria">Telodendria</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#table-of-contents">Table of Contents</a></li>
<li><a href="#download">Download</a></li>
<li><a href="#building-the-source">Building The Source</a></li>
</li>
<li><a href="#configure">Configure Telodendria</a></li>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#project-status">Project Status</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#phase-1">Phase 1: Getting Off The Ground</a></li>
<li><a href="#phase-2">Phase 2: Building A Foundation</a></li>
<li><a href="#phase-3">Phase 3: Welcome To Matrix</a></li>
<li><a href="#phase-4">Phase 4: A Real Homeserver</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#documentation-status">Documentation Status</a></li>
<li><a href="#rationale">Rationale</a></li>
<li><a href="#project-goals">Project Goals</a></li>
<li><a href="#getting-support">Getting Support</a></li>
<a href="#contributing">Contributing</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#reporting-issues">Reporting Issues</a></li>
<li>
<a href="#Developing">Developing</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#getting-the-code">Getting The Code</a></li>
<li><a href="#code-style">Code Style</a></li>
<li><a href="#submitting-patches">Subitting Patches</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#license">License</a></li>
<li><a href="#change-log">Change Log</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="download">Download</h2>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is distributed as source tarballs, in true Unix
fashion. If you want, you can verify the checksum of your download,
and check the signature. To check the signature, you'll need
<code>signify</code>, and the signify public key:
<a href="/telodendria-signify.pub">
telodendria-signify.pub</a>.
</p>
<p>
If your operating system has an official package or port of
<b>Telodendria</b>, you should prefer to use that instead of manually
downloading the source and building it. If your operating system's
package or port is too out of date for your tastes, please contact
the package's maintainers to notify them, or offer to update the
package yourself.
</p>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Version</th>
<th>Download</th>
<th>Checksum</th>
<th>Signature</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>v0.0.0</td>
<td>
<a href="/pub/v0.0.0/Telodendria-v0.0.0.tar.gz">
Telodendria-v0.0.0.tar.gz
</a>
</td>
<td>
<a href="/pub/v0.0.0/Telodendria-v0.0.0.tar.gz.sha256">
SHA256
</a>
</td>
<td>
<a href="/pub/v0.0.0/Telodendria-v0.0.0.tar.gz.sig">
Signify
</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>
You can check out the change log <a href="#change-log">here</a>.
</p>
<h2 id="building-the-source">Building The Source</h4>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is designed to be light enough that it can be built
from source on just about any operating system. It only has the
following requirements, all of which should be already available to
you on a sufficiently complete operating system:
</p>
<ul>
<li>
A standards-compliant C compiler with the C standard library. Because
<b>Telodendria</b> is written in ANSI C, it should compile on just about
any compiler, but the following compilers are known to work:
<ul>
<li>GCC</li>
<li>Clang</li>
<li>
Tiny C Compiler (<b>Note:</b> must edit <code>make.sh</code> and remove
<code>-Wl,-static -Wl,-gc-sections</code> from <code>LDFLAGS</code>)
</li>
</ul>
Other compilers should work as well, but you may have to play with the
flags in <code>make.sh</code>.
</li>
<li>
POSIX base utilities, including <code>find</code>, <code>stat</code>,
<code>env</code>, and compliant <code>sh</code>-like shell.
</li>
</ul>
<div class="code">
$ ./make.sh
</div>
<p>
If everything went well, that will produce
<code>telodendria.cgi</code>, which you can then place under your web
root and configure your web server to execute. You'll need to make sure
<code>/.well-known/matrix</code> and <code>/_matrix</code> and all the
paths under them actually execute <code>telodendria.cgi</code>. See the
provided OpenBSD <code>httpd.conf</code> for reference. Even if you
aren't using OpenBSD's <code>httpd(8)</code>, you should find its
configuration syntax simple enough to adequately demonstrate the proper
configuration.
</p>
<h2 id="configure">Configure Telodendria</h3>
<p>
Once you get <b>Telodendria</b> built and hooked into your web server,
you will have to write a configuration file for it. The configuration
file is just JSON, and it should be called
<code>Telodendria.json</code>.
</p>
<h2 id="project-status">Project Status</h2>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is a very ambitious project. There's a lot that needs
to happen yet before it is usable. At the moment, there's nothing that
even remotely resembles a Matrix homeserver here; I'm still
getting off the ground and building a foundation.
</p>
<p>
But just because there's nothing here yet doesn't mean you should go away!
I could always use help, so you are more than welcome to help
out if you want things to go quicker. Please see the
<a href="#contributing">Contributing</a> section for details on how you
can get involved.
</p>
<h3 id="phase-1">Phase 1: Getting Off The Ground</h3>
<ul>
<li><s>Name this project</s></li>
<li><s>Set up a CVS repository</s></li>
<li><s>Make CVS repository public</s></li>
<li><s>Write a coding style guide</s></li>
<li><s>Write a build script</s></li>
<li><s>Add a license</s></li>
<li><s>Add support and issue reporting guide</s></li>
<li><s>Add table of contents to this document</s></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="phase-2">Phase 2: Building A Foundation</h3>
<ul>
<li><s>Implement an array</s></li>
<li><s>Implement a logging facility</s></li>
<li><s>Implement argument parsing (<code>-c file -Vh</code>)</s></li>
<li><s>Implement a hash map</s></li>
<li><s>Combine library code files</s></li>
<li><s>Implement configuration file parsing using the hash map</s></li>
<li><s>Base64 encoding/decoding with padded/unpadded support</s></li>
<li><s>Write a release script</s></li>
<li>Implement a JSON library using the hash map and array</li>
<li><s>Figure out how to w</s>Write unit tests for array/hashmap/etc</li>
<li>Add license/documentation comments to all source files</li>
<li>Implement a simple HTTP server</li>
<li>
Design the server architecture
<ul>
<li>Route requests</li>
<li>Handle requests</li>
<li>Data abstraction layer</li>
<li>Error generation</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="phase-3">Phase 3: Welcome To Matrix</h3>
<ul>
<li>
Implement the Client-Server API
</li>
<li>
Implement the Server-Server API
</li>
<li>
Implement the other Matrix APIs
</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="phase-4">Phase 4: A Real Homeserver</h3>
<ul>
<li>
Create an OpenBSD package and get it submitted to ports
</li>
<li>
Create a command line tool to manage Telodendria
<ul>
<li>Configuration file generation</li>
<li>User management</li>
<li>Room management</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
Migrate from Synapse. I run a Synapse homeserver right now, so somehow
I have to get all my data into the Telodendria format.
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="documentation-status">Documentation Status</h2>
<p>
This documentation needs just a little work. Here's the things
on my list for that:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Update Rationale section</li>
<li>Update Project description (no longer a CGI binary)</li>
<li>Update project code requirements (ANSI C, POSIX.1c)</li>
<li>Clean up dark mode colors (tables, background, code snippets</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="rationale">Rationale</h2>
<p>
This section explains
</p>
<p>
I want a lightweight Matrix homeserver designed for OpenBSD. I want a
homeserver that can be developed in <code>vi(1)</code> and compiled
with a C compiler. I want it to function entirely on a base OpenBSD
install without having to install any extra packages whatsoever. I've
found that the existing homeserver implementations are way
over-engineered and written in such a way that many programs and
libraries have to be pulled in to use them. I also want to learn how
Matrix works, and I want to understand the code I'm running on my
server.
</p>
<p>
So I wrote Telodendria.
</p>
<p>
Telodendria is written entirely in portable ANSI C. It depends on no
third-party C libraries other than the standard C library. The only
thing you need to run it is a web server that supports executing CGI
programs, and a directory that data can be written to. Everything
Telodendria needs to run itself is compiled into a single static
binary, and the source code can be built anywhere, right out of the
box.
</p>
<p>
Telodendria doesn't use a database like all the other homeservers.
Instead, it operates more like email: it uses a flat-file data
structure similar to maildir to store data. The advantage of this is
that it saves server maintainers from also having to maintain a
database. It greatly simplifies the process of getting a Matrix
homeserver up and running, and it makes it highly portable. It also is
extremely easy to back up and restore with base tools; just
<code>tar(1)</code> up the directory, and you're good to go.
</p>
<p>
Telodendria is developed and tested on OpenBSD, but you'll find that it
should run under any web server that supports CGI. I chose to write
Telodendria as a CGI program because anyone running an existing Matrix
server is likely running a web server acting as a reverse proxy in
front of it anyway, so why not just hook the homeserver directly into
the web server? That's one less daemon to run, which means memory and
CPU savings. CGI also allows Telodendria to remain single-threaded.
Each request that comes in is handled as its own process, and
operations are entirely isolated.
</p>
<h2 id="project-goals">Project Goals</h2>
<p>
The goals of this project are as follows:
</p>
<ul>
<li>
To be a production-ready Matrix server capable of handling a lot of
users. Telodendria should have good performance in many diverse
environments.
</li>
<li>
To have as few external build and run dependencies as possible. It
should be possible to compile Telodendria on any operating system out
of the box, and have it be totally statically linked, ready to run
under a <code>chroot(8)</code>-ed web server. You'll even notice that
the documentation is written in HTML directly, not Markdown, to remove
the dependency on a Markdown parser and renderer.
</li>
<li>
To be written in clean, elegant, and well-documented code. The goal is
to build a Matrix homeserver from the ground up, not just because I
don't the way existing homeservers are implemented, but also so I can
learn how Matrix really works, and maybe even teach others along the
way.
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="getting-support">Getting Support</h2>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is designed to be fairly straightforward, but that
doesn't mean there won't be hiccups along the way. If you are struggling
to get <b>Telodendria</b> up and running, you're more than welcome to
reach out for support. Just join the
<code>#telodendria-general:bancino.net</code> Matrix channel. Before
you do though, make sure you're running the latest version of
<b>Telodendria</b> and you've thoroughly read through all the
relevant documentation.
</p>
<h2 id="contributing">Contributing</h2>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b> is an open source project. As such, it welcomes
contributions. There are many ways you can contribute, and any way you
can is greatly appreciated.
</p>
<h3 id="reporting-issues">Reporting Issues</h3>
<p>
If—after you've reached out to
<code>#telodendria-general:bancino.net</code>—it has been
determined that there is a problem with <b>Telodendria</b>, it should
be reported to <code>#telodendria-issues:bancino.net</code>. There it
can be discussed further. The issues channel serves as the official
issue tracker of <b>Telodendria</b>; although issues may be copied
into a <code>TODO</code> file in the CVS repository just so they
don't get lost.
</p>
<h3 id="developing">Developing</h3>
<p>
The primary language used to write <b>Telodendria</b> code is ANSI C.
Yes, that's the original C standard from 1989. The reason this standard
is chosen, and the reason that it will not be changed, is because the
original C is the most portable. Other languages you'll find in the
<b>Telodendria</b> repository are shell scripts and HTML. If you have
any experience at all with any of these languages, your contributions
are valuable. Please follow the guidelines in this section to ensure
the contribution workflow goes as smoothly as possible.
</p>
<h4 id="getting-the-code">Getting The Code</h4>
<p>
You can download an official release tarball if you would really like,
but the preferred way is to check out the source code from CVS. This
makes generating patches a lot easier. If you do not have CVS, consult
your operating system's package repository to install it. CVS was the
chosen version control system for this project primarily because it is
built into OpenBSD.
</p>
<div class="code">
$ export CVSROOT=anoncvs@bancino.net:/cvs
$ cvs checkout Telodendria
$ cd Telodendria
</div>
<p>
You should now have the latest <b>Telodendria</b> source code. Follow
the <a href="#code-style">Code Style</a> as you make your changes.
</p>
<h4 id="code-style">Code Style</h4>
<p>
<b>Telodendria</b>'s code style is very unique. In general, these are
the conventions used by the code base.
</p>
<ul>
<li>
All function, enumeration, structure, and header names are
<code>CamelCase</code>. This is preferred to <code>snake_case</code>
because it is more compact.
</li>
<li>
<code>enum</code>s and <code>struct</code>s are always
<code>typedef</code>-ed to their same name. The <code>typedef</code>
occurs in the public API header, and the actual declaration occurs in
the private implementation header.
</li>
<li>
Indentation is done with spaces. This ensures that files look the same
for everyone. It also makes line wrapping rules much easier because
the indentations are the same size. Please configure your editor to
make the <kbd>Tab</kbd> key insert spaces, and if it does automatic
indentation, make sure it indents with spaces. If you cannot configure
your editor to insert spaces, then you can try running the code files
you were working on through <code>expand</code>. A unit of indentation
is 4 spaces.
</li>
<li>
Lines should not exceed 72 characters, including indentations. Some
developers use <code>vi(1)</code> in an 80x24 terminal to write code.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
This guide may be subject to change. The source code is the absolute
source of truth, so as long as you make your code look like the
code surrounding it, you should be fine.
</p>
<h4 id="submitting-patches">Submitting Patches</h4>
<p>
Submitting patches is fairly easy to do if you've got the CVS sources
checked out. Once you have made your changes, just run
<code>cvs diff</code>:
</p>
<div class="code">
$ cvs diff -uNp > your-changes.patch
</div>
<p>
Then, send the resulting patches to
<code>#telodendria-patches:bancino.net</code>, where they will be
promptly reviewed by the community.
</p>
<h2 id="license">License</h2>
<p>
All of the code and documentation for <b>Telodendria</b> is licensed
under the following terms and conditions:
</p>
<div class="code">
Copyright (C) 2022 Jordan Bancino <@jordan:bancino.net>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
</div>
<h2 id="change-log">Change Log</h2>
<p>
At this time, Telodendria does not have any tagged releases because it
is not yet functional as a Matrix homeserver. Please check out the <a
href="#project-status">Project Status</a> to see where things are
currently at.
</p>
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