Telodendria: The terminal branches of an axon.
Note: Telodendria is under heavy development. Please see the Project Status.
Telodendria is a Matrix homeserver implementation written from scratch in ANSI C. It is designed to be lightweight and simple, yet functional. Telodendria differentiates itself from other Matrix homeserver implementations because it:
Telodendria is on Matrix! Check out the official Matrix rooms:
Room | Description |
---|---|
#telodendria-releases:bancino.net
|
Get notified of new releases. |
#telodendria-general:bancino.net
|
General discussion and support for Telodendria. |
#telodendria-issues:bancino.net
|
Report issues with Telodendria. |
#telodendria-patches:bancino.net
|
Submit code patches to the Telodendria project. |
Telodendria 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
signify
, and the signify public key:
telodendria-signify.pub.
If your operating system has an official package or port of Telodendria, 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.
Version | Download | Checksum | Signature |
---|---|---|---|
v0.0.0 | Telodendria-v0.0.0.tar.gz | SHA256 | Signify |
Telodendria 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:
make.sh
and remove
-Wl,-static -Wl,-gc-sections
from LDFLAGS
)
make.sh
.
find
, stat
,
env
, and compliant sh
-like shell.
If everything went well, that will produce
telodendria.cgi
, which you can then place under your web
root and configure your web server to execute. You'll need to make sure
/.well-known/matrix
and /_matrix
and all the
paths under them actually execute telodendria.cgi
. See the
provided OpenBSD httpd.conf
for reference. Even if you
aren't using OpenBSD's httpd(8)
, you should find its
configuration syntax simple enough to adequately demonstrate the proper
configuration.
Once you get Telodendria 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
Telodendria.json
.
Telodendria is a very ambitious project. There's a lot that needs to happen yet before it is even remotely usable. At the moment, there's nothing that even remotely resembles a Matrix homeserver here; we're still getting off the ground and building a foundation.
Just because there's nothing here yet doesn't mean you should go away though! We desparately need help, so you are more than welcome to help out if you want things to go quicker. Please see the Contributing section for details on how you can get involved.
-c file -Vh
)This documentation needs just a little work. Here's the things on my list for that:
This section explains
I want a lightweight Matrix homeserver designed for OpenBSD. I want a
homeserver that can be developed in vi(1)
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.
So I wrote Telodendria.
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.
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
tar(1)
up the directory, and you're good to go.
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.
The goals of this project are as follows:
chroot(8)
-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.
Telodendria 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 Telodendria up and running, you're more than welcome to
reach out for support. Just join the
#telodendria-general:bancino.net
Matrix channel. Before
you do though, make sure you're running the latest version of
Telodendria and you've thoroughly read through all the
relevant documentation.
Telodendria 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.
If—after you've reached out to
#telodendria-general:bancino.net
—it has been
determined that there is a problem with Telodendria, it should
be reported to #telodendria-issues:bancino.net
. There it
can be discussed further. The issues channel serves as the official
issue tracker of Telodendria; although issues may be copied
into a TODO
file in the CVS repository just so they
don't get lost.
The primary language used to write Telodendria 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 Telodendria 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.
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.
You should now have the latest Telodendria source code. Follow the Code Style as you make your changes.
Telodendria's code style is very unique. In general, these are the conventions used by the code base.
CamelCase
. This is preferred to snake_case
because it is more compact.
enum
s and struct
s are always
typedef
-ed to their same name. The typedef
occurs in the public API header, and the actual declaration occurs in
the private implementation header.
expand
. A unit of indentation
is 4 spaces.
vi(1)
in an 80x24 terminal to write code.
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.
Submitting patches is fairly easy to do if you've got the CVS sources
checked out. Once you have made your changes, just run
cvs diff
:
Then, send the resulting patches to
#telodendria-patches:bancino.net
, where they will be
promptly reviewed by the community.
All of the code and documentation for Telodendria is licensed under the following terms and conditions:
At this time, Telodendria does not have any tagged releases because it is not yet functional as a Matrix homeserver. Please check out the Project Status to see where things are currently at.