Adding Chat to Drupal

I am going to assume that users reading this understand how to install Drupal modules, so I will skip that configuration aspect. For this example my Openfire and Drupal services are on separate servers. This to me is the best option considering the criticality that both may represent in an organization. With that said, we need to do a couple extra steps to get this configuration working properly. I would also like to point out that authentication will be done via Apache. This demo is using an HTTP site, but I would recommend using HTTPS considering we will be using Basic Authentication for Apache.

Download the following modules:

• xmppframework
• webserver authentication

Install the modules and go to the administration panel for the webserver authentication module. In the "Email domain" section, fill in the domain for your local environment. Under advanced settings make sure both options are checked off. There is no need to fill in anything for the User account modification section.

With this in place, lets move over to the Apache configuration and take care of a few things there before moving on to the xmppframework module. I am not going to post an Apache configuration here as everyone may have a different structure. I will however include what you need to get this all up and running. 

1.  Edit your main site file and include the following information inside of a location block:
   • AuthzLDAPAuthoritative on
   • AuthBasicProvider ldap
   • AuthType Basic
   • AuthName "Company Name"
   • AuthLDAPURL "ldap://LDAPHOST:389/OU=your_ou,DC=your_domain,DC=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=*)"
   • AuthLDAPBindDN "CN=binder_account,OU=your_ou,DC=your_domain,DC=com"
   • AuthLDAPBindPassword password_for_binder
   • Require valid-user
2. Since our chat services are on a different server, we need to proxy the communication from the Drupal installation to the remote chat server. To do this we are going to use HTTP-Bind for the connection and add the following within our Apache configuration:
   • RewriteEngine on
   • RewriteRule ^/http-bind/ http://192.168.47.142:7070/http-bind/ [P]
3. Save the configuration, but don't restart Apache quite yet. We need to enable some modules or none of this will work correctly. Enable the following:
   • rewrite
   • proxy
   • proxy_http
   • authnz_ldap
4. Once the modules are enabled, do a force reload on Apache.
   • /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
5. The last thing we need to do before leaving this server is make sure our Proxy is going to let us make the request out to our Openfire server.
   • cd /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.conf
   • Ensure your configuration says the following:
     • ProxyRequests Off
     • Order deny,allow
     • Allow from all
     • Allow from localhost
     • ProxyVia On
6. Restart Apache one more time and test out to see to make sure everything is working by going to the following:
   • http://your_drupal_server/http-bind/
7. You should have an HTTP 400 error claiming a Bad_Request was sent in. If you get this then were ready to move on.
8.  Go back to your administrator panel in Drupal and look for XMPP Framework. There are 3 main options that we are worried about with this module.
   • Client (Launch Settings)
     • HTTP Bind
     • SASL
     • conference.your_domain.com
     • vjud.your_domain.com
     • English
   • User (User Settings)
     • Check Authenticate User with WS Credentials (custom patch - see here)
   • User (Provisioning Settings)
     • your_domain.com
     • Check Provision XMPP for Drupal Users
   • XMPP API Settings
     • server ip/hostname
     • 7070
     • admin user
     • admin password
     • your_domain.com
9. The module is now configured and we're close to chatting it up. Head over to the administrator panel and take a look under "Blocks". There should be an XMPP_CLIENT: Chat Launch block that you can place on your site. Add this somewhere and save.
10. The last thing we need to do is fill in our JID for our user (this can be scripted for large user sets). Go to your account and scroll down until you see JID. The format will be user.name@your_domain.com.

Here is a picture of the end result in action.

At this point the configuration is 100% complete, but we can expand on it further by adding presence from each user into the portal. Check out this posting for more information.