How to set up Matrix with purple-matrix

It is possible to communicate with matrix on bitlbee via libpurple and purple-matrix

Building and Installing

Ubuntu packages

Pre-built binaries are available for Ubuntu since version 17.04 (Zesty Zapus). You should be able to install them giving the following commands in a terminal window:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install purple-matrix

ArchLinux package

There package purple-matrix-git is available for Archlinux in AUR. The package works with bitlbee-libpurple-git and perhaps bitlbee-libpurple too.

OpenBSD package

A package is available in ports, however, make sure you have installed the bitlbee-libpurple flavor first. To install, enter in a terminal:

# pkg_add purple-matrix

Building from source

Building the plugin from source you will need development headers/libraries for the following:

• libpurple 2.x [libpurple-dev] libjson-glib [libjson-glib-dev] libglib [libglib-dev (or libglib2.0-dev on Ubuntu 16.04 xenial)] libhttp_parser [libhttp-parser-dev].

You should then be able to:

$ git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix.git
$ cd purple-matrix
$ make
$ sudo make install

Usage

Add the account with:

> account add matrix <user_id or user localpart> <password>
> account matrix set home_server <home_server>
> account matrix on

Example:

> account add matrix @username:example.com password
> account matrix set home_server https://matrix.example.com/
> account matrix on

Known Issues

No support for encryption

No support for encrypted messages. Chat messages are always sent unencrypted. Incoming encrypted messages are silently dropped! See Github issue #18.

Homeserver Port

If the homeserver you're connecting to requires a custom port, login will fail. See Github issue #115

Human friendly chatroom names

chat names in matrix-purple are identified by ID in bitlbee and not with human friendly names, see GitHub issue #55

No SSO Support

See Github issue #107 (!!!)