Dependencies

Installing the 3rd party dependencies

We use development tools 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.

Alternatively you can use your operating system’s package manager to install Node.js.

Also make sure you have Git installed. See here.

Now use git to check out the Converse repository:

git clone https://github.com/conversejs/converse.js.git

Now go into the repository checkout and run make dev in order to set up the development environment.

cd converse.js
make dev

If you’re using Windows, or don’t have GNU Make installed, you can run the following:

cd converse.js
npm install
npm run lerna

This will install the Node.js development tools and Converse’s dependencies.

The front-end dependencies are those JavaScript files on which Converse directly depends and which will be loaded in the browser as part of the bundle in dist/converse.js (or dist/converse.min.js).

To see the 3rd party dependencies (not just the front-end dependencies, but also ones necessary for development tasks like making builds), take a look at the list under the devDependencies in package.json.

Note

After running `make dev`, you should now have a new node_modules directory which contains all the external dependencies of Converse. 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 ask in our chatroom: dicuss@conference.conversejs.org.

If you don’t have an XMPP client installed, follow this link to conversejs.org where you can log in and be taken directly to the chatroom.

Brief description of Converse’s dependencies

Converse relies on the following dependencies:

  • DayJS provides a better API for handling dates and times.

  • Strophe.js maintains the XMPP session, is used to build XMPP stanzas, to send them, and to register handlers for received stanzas.

  • lodash provides very useful utility functions.

  • Skeletor, a Backbone fork which is used to model the data as Models and Collections and to create Views that render the UI.

  • pluggable.js provides the plugin architecture for Converse. It registers and initializes plugins and allows existing attributes, functions and objects on Converse to be overridden inside plugins.

Libsignal

If you want OMEMO encryption, you need to load libsignal separately in your page.

For example:

<script src="3rdparty/libsignal-protocol-javascript/dist/libsignal-protocol.js"></script>

The reason libsignal needs to be loaded separately is because it’s released under the GPLv3 which requires all other dependent JavaScript code to also be open sourced under the same license. You might not be willing to adhere to those terms, which is why you need to decide for yourself whether you’re going to load libsignal or not.