March 10, 2026
Caffeinated pings, piping hot takes
Sending Jabber/XMPP Messages via HTTP
Old-school chat gets a “send via web” button — cue coffee jokes, cert panic, and open‑web nostalgia
TLDR: A tutorial shows how to send XMPP messages via a simple web request, perfect for scriptable alerts. Commenters split between worries about Let’s Encrypt certificates breaking XMPP, tool tips like Apprise, and a nostalgia trip for the open, bot‑filled chat days—highlighting why lightweight, open messaging still matters.
A new how‑to shows how to send Jabber/XMPP (an old, open chat standard) messages using a simple web link, so your scripts can ping you with “Your flat white is done.” It uses Prosody, a lightweight chat server, plus a module that exposes a tiny HTTP endpoint. Think: notifications to your phone without joining another big‑tech app.
The comments? Spicy. One camp is nervously eyeing certificates: user giancarlostoro wonders if using Certbot (the Let’s Encrypt tool) will eventually make XMPP connections break, pointing to a debate about certificate rules here. It’s classic open‑source drama: a handy tutorial turns into “will the internet’s free certificate factory rug‑pull my chat?”. Another camp is pure pragmatists: basemi drops a straight‑faced “See also Apprise,” linking to an all‑in‑one notifier tool like a seasoned sysadmin saying, “Use what works.”
Then there’s the nostalgia wave. rainingmonkey reminisces about IRC, the old group chats swarming with goofy bots, and asks for real‑world examples of this setup. Meanwhile, gogasca sighs that the world was better with Jabber/XMPP, before everyone got locked into WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage. The coffee‑themed example (“coffee@…”, “flat white”) fuels the jokes: commenters dub it “Barista‑as‑a‑Service” and imagine a bot telling them when the espresso shot pulls. Bottom line: a tiny bridge from web to XMPP has the crowd split between certificate dread, tool‑sharing pragmatism, and longing for the federated good old days.
Key Points
- •Tutorial shows how to send XMPP messages via an HTTP REST API using Prosody IM.
- •Environment assumes Debian 13 and a domain with an A record pointing to the server.
- •Install Prosody, prosody-modules, lua-unbound, liblua5.4-dev, and Certbot; install mod_post_msg via the Prosody plugin installer.
- •Configure a minimal Prosody setup enabling tls, dialback, http, admin_shell, and post_msg; disable c2s and offline.
- •Obtain Let’s Encrypt certificates with Certbot, import into Prosody, start the service, and use curl to POST messages to /msg with Basic Auth.