Open group setup

Open groups are Session group chat servers that can host many thousands of chat participants. This guide explains how to set up a Session open group.

Note: Open groups provide transit encryption, but open group messages are not encrypted while stored on the open group server, making closed groups (which can be created within Session itself) a better solution for high-security communications with groups of 100 or less people.

Open groups are based on an express REST API for serving persistent-history public chat rooms. Open groups are unlimited in size, as they are hosted by your own server. Please be aware these are public groups, and highly sensitive private information should not be shared in this group format.

Open group servers are run by 2 daemons: the platform server, providing an ADN standard REST API, and another daemon with Session-specific behaviors (crypto-key registration and enhanced moderation functions).

Installation

Note: .debs for the Session Open Group server are currently only available for Ubuntu 20.04. For other operating systems, you can either or use .

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1. Pull in the Session open group server executable

Pull in the Session Open Group Server executable by running the following commands

sudo curl -so /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/oxen.gpg https://deb.oxen.io/pub.gpg

echo "deb https://deb.oxen.io $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oxen.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install session-open-group-server

sudo chown _loki /var/lib/session-open-group-server -R

2. Add a room

Add a room of your choice with the following command:

session-open-group-server --add-room {room_id} {room_name}

room_id must be lowercase and consist of only letters, numbers and underscores.

For example:

session-open-group-server --add-room fish FishingAustralia

3. Print your server's URL

Print the URL users can use to join rooms on your open group server by running:

session-open-group-server --print-url

This will output a result similar to:

http://[host_name_or_ip]/[room_id]?public_key=2054fa3271f27ec9e55492c85d022f9582cb4aa2f457e4b885147fb913b9c131

You will need to replace [host_name_or_ip] with the IP address of your VPS or the domain mapping to your IP address, and [room_id] with the ID of one of the rooms you created earlier.

For example:

http://116.203.217.101/fish?public_key=2054fa3271f27ec9e55492c85d022f9582cb4aa2f457e4b885147fb913b9c131

This URL can then be used to join the group inside the Session app.

4. Make yourself a moderator

Make yourself a moderator using the following command:

session-open-group-server --add-moderator {your_session_id} {room_id}

For example:

session-open-group-server --add-moderator 05d871fc80ca007eed9b2f4df72853e2a2d5465a92fcb1889fb5c84aa2833b3b40 fish

5. Add an image for your new room (Optional)

Use Session desktop to upload a picture for your room

Rename it to {room_id} (no file extension)

Customization

The default options the Session open group server runs with should be fine in most cases, but if you like you can run on a custom port or host, specify the path to the X25519 key pair you want to use, etc. To do this, simply add to the ExecStart line in your systemd service file (normally located under /etc/systemd/system) and restart your service using:

systemctl restart session-open-group-server.service

Getting help

If something in this guide doesn't make sense, or if you’re running into issues that you can’t identify on your own, the first place to go would be the Oxen . Alternatively, you can find help on our other communication channels: , or .

Reporting bugs

If you've sought help through our communication channels but have not arrived at a solution for your issue, we recommend opening an issue ticket on the GitHub repository.

Add your room on Session desktop using the URL printed earlier

Upload a JPG to your VPS

Put it in /var/lib/session-open-group-server/files

Open group setup

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