mod_pastebin

Introduction

Pastebins are used very often in IM, especially in chat rooms. You have a long log or command output which you need to send to someone over IM, and don’t want to fill their message window with it. Put it on a pastebin site, and give them the URL instead, simple.

Not for everyone… no matter how hard you try, people will be unaware, or not care. They may also be too lazy to visit a pastebin. This is where mod_pastebin comes in!

Details

When someone posts to a room a “large” (the actual limit is configurable) message, Prosody will intercept the message and convert it to a URL pointing to a built-in pastebin server. The URLs are randomly generated, so they can be considered for most purposes to be private, and cannot be discovered by people who are not in the room.

Usage

To set up mod_pastebin for MUC rooms it must be explicitly loaded, as in the example below - it won’t work when loaded globally, as that will only load it onto normal virtual hosts.

For example:

Component "conference.example.com" "muc"
    modules_enabled = { "pastebin" }

Pastes will be available by default at http://<your-prosody>:5280/pastebin/ by default.

In Prosody 0.9 and later this can be changed with HTTP settings.

In 0.8 and older this can be changed with pastebin_ports (see below), or you can forward another external URL from your web server to Prosody, use pastebin_url to set that URL.

Discovery

The line and character tresholds are advertised in service discovery like this:

<iq id="791d37e8-86d8-45df-adc2-9bcb17c45cb7" type="result" xml:lang="en" from="prosody@conference.prosody.im">
  <query xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info">
    <identity type="text" name="Prosŏdy IM Chatroom" category="conference"/>
    <feature var="http://jabber.org/protocol/muc"/>
    <feature var="https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pastebin"/>
    <x xmlns="jabber:x:data" type="result">
      <field type="hidden" var="FORM_TYPE">
        <value>http://jabber.org/protocol/muc#roominfo</value>
      </field>
      <field label="Title" type="text-single" var="muc#roomconfig_roomname">
        <value>Prosŏdy IM Chatroom</value>
      </field>
      <!-- etc... -->
      <field type="text-single" var="{https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pastebin}max_lines">
        <value>12</value>
      </field>
      <field type="text-single" var="{https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pastebin}max_characters">
        <value>1584</value>
      </field>
    </x>
  </query>
</iq>

Configuration

Option Description
pastebin_threshold Maximum length (in characters) of a message that is allowed to skip the pastebin. (default 500 characters)
pastebin_line_threshold The maximum number of lines a message may have before it is sent to the pastebin. (default 4 lines)
pastebin_trigger A string of characters (e.g. “!paste”) which if detected at the start of a message, always sends the message to the pastebin, regardless of length. (default: not set)
pastebin_expire_after Number of hours after which to expire (remove) a paste, defaults to 24. Set to 0 to store pastes permanently on disk.
pastebin_ports List of ports to run the HTTP server on, same format as mod_httpserver’s http_ports1
pastebin_url Base URL to display for pastebin links, must end with / and redirect to Prosody’s built-in HTTP server2

Compatibility

0.11 Works
0.10 Works
0.9 Works
0.8 Works

Todo


  1. As of Prosody 0.9, pastebin_ports is replaced by http_ports, see Prosody HTTP server documentation↩︎

  2. See also http_external_url↩︎


Installation

With the plugin installer in Prosody 0.12 you can use:

sudo prosodyctl install --server=https://modules.prosody.im/rocks/ mod_pastebin

For earlier versions see the documentation for installing 3rd party modules