Prosody Dependencies
Prosody depends on other applications or libraries to allow certain functionality.
This page describes the different runtime dependencies we have, what they are for, and how to get hold of them if you don’t have them.
Note: If you are trying to build Prosody from source then you will need additional dependencies, please see Installing from source for a short how-to.
Optional
lua-readline
Recommended
- Used for
- History and editing capabilities in the console
- Prosody version
- 0.12.0
LuaRocks
Recommended
- Used for
- Plugin installer
- Prosody version
- 0.12.0
- Supported versions:
- 2.x, 3.x (recommended)
Enables installation of plugins using prosodyctl.
LuaRocks 2.x on Debian/Ubuntu can be unreliable when multiple versions of Lua are installed - it will always install packages for the oldest version of Lua available on the system, rather than the version of Lua that Prosody is using.
luaunbound
Recommended
- Used for
- Secure asynchronous DNS lookups
- Required version
- 0.5+
- Prosody version
- 0.12.0
In Debian 11+ and Ubuntu 21.04+ you can install the
lua-unbound
package:
sudo apt install lua-unbound
LuaEvent
Optional
- Used for
- Efficiently scaling above hundreds of concurrent connections
- Required version
- luaevent 0.3.2+ (0.4.4+ recommended) with libevent 2.0+
LuaEvent is an optional dependency you should install if you intend your server to be handling large numbers of concurrent connections. Information on how to configure Prosody in this instance can be found here.
Users on Debian/Ubuntu with our Prosody package repository added can install luaevent or luaevent-prosody like so:
sudo apt install lua-event
This will automatically install libevent if you don’t have it. It is not recommended to use libevent versions before 2.0.
Users on Mac OS X can use homebrew to install LuaEvent:
brew install https://prosody.im/files/homebrew/luaevent.rb
LuaSQLite3
Optional
- Used for
- SQL database support (SQLite3 only)
- Prosody version
- trunk (not released yet)
This module is used by mod_storage_sql for connecting to SQLite3 databases, as an alternative to LuaDBI.
LuaDBI
Optional
- Used for
- Connecting to SQL databases (SQLite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL)
- Required version
- 0.6+
This module is used by mod_storage_sql for connecting to SQL databases.
It is recommended that SQLite3 be compiled with the SQLITE_ENABLE_UPDATE_DELETE_LIMIT
option.
Debian/Ubuntu and derived GNU/Linux distributions
Simply install the package ‘lua-dbi-DATABASE’, where DATABASE is one
of: mysql
or postgresql
or
sqlite3
If the package isn’t found in your distribution, you may need to add our package repository to your system.
Source
If you use another platform that doesn’t have packages for LuaDBI yet then you will need to compile from source, which can be found at https://github.com/mwild1/luadbi/releases/latest.
BitOp
Recommended on Lua 5.1
- Used for
- Efficient bit-level manipulation.
Used by mod_websocket
There are two alternative bit-op modules.
- Lua 5.2+ comes with
bit32
built in. bit32
for Lua 5.1 is available in LuaRocks and aslua-bit32
in Debian / Ubuntu- LuaJIT 2 comes with
bit
built in, which is available for Lua 5.1 aslua-bitop
in Debian / Ubuntu.
struct
Used by Prosody 0.11.x only
- Used for
- Converting numbers to and from their binary representation.
Used by mod_websocket. If not available, bitops will be used.
Unknown if packaged anywhere, available from http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/struct/.
Equivalent functionality to this module is included in Lua 5.3+ and Prosody 0.12+. Therefore this module is only recommended for Prosody 0.11.x installations on Lua 5.1 or 5.2.
⚠️ There exist other Lua modules with the exact same name, some of which have an incompatible API which will not work with Prosody.
ICU
- Used for
- Unicode normalisation etc, alternative to libidn
Required by mod_mimicking
To use, enable in configure
step like:
./configure --idn-library=icu
LuaLDAP
https://github.com/lualdap/lualdap
- Used for
- LDAP authentication
Required
Lua
- Used for
- Runtime for majority of Prosody code
Required
Prosody is mostly written in Lua, so it needs a Lua runtime.
As of 0.12 Prosody supports the following Lua versions:
- Lua 5.1 (deprecated, but still functional - Prosody 0.12.x will be the last Prosody series to support Lua 5.1)
- Lua 5.2 (supported)
- Lua 5.3 (supported)
- Lua 5.4 (recommended, only if 5.4-compatible dependencies are available)
LuaSocket
Required
- Used for
- Accepting and making network connections
- Required version
- 3.x
Debian and Ubuntu users can easily install LuaSocket with apt, simply run:
sudo apt install lua-socket
BSD and users of other Linux distributions have reported success using luarocks to install the ‘luasocket’ rock.
LuaSec
Required
- Used for
- SSL/TLS support
- Required version
- 0.7+
Debian and Ubuntu users can easily install LuaSec with apt, simply run:
sudo apt install lua-sec
On Mac OS X you can use Homebrew to install LuaSec:
brew install https://prosody.im/files/homebrew/luasec.rb
You can also download the source from the LuaSec link above, it is not hard to build, and requires just liblua5.2 and libssl to compile.
LuaExpat
Required
https://matthewwild.co.uk/projects/luaexpat/
- Used for
- Parsing XML/XMPP streams
- Required version
- 1.2.x+, 1.4.x+ recommended
Debian and Ubuntu users can easily install LuaExpat with apt, simply run:
sudo apt install lua-expat
BSD and users of other Linux distributions have reported success
using luarocks to install the
‘luaexpat’ rock.
‘luaexpat’ on luarocks now points to fork without certain features Prosody needs, see issue #1375.
⚠️ Although Prosody works with versions of LuaExpat prior to 1.3, they leave Prosody open to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Prosody will warn if this is the case and it is strongly recommended you upgrade, or disable mod_compression (note: it is disabled by default). If you do not see the warning in your log file, you are not vulnerable (e.g. Debian stable has 1.2.0 but with patches to resolve the issue).
LuaFileSystem
Required
- Used for
- Managing Prosody’s data store and permissions
- Required version
-
1.6.2 or higher, or Debian’s
lua-filesystem
package
LuaFileSystem is automatically installed by our packages, but if you find yourself without it for some reason it is easy to obtain. Debian/Ubuntu users can run the following command to install it:
sudo apt install lua-filesystem