weechat for matrix.org on a Digitalocean droplet with tmux

Henrik — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 07:41:06 +0000

A quick writeup of what I learned installing weechat on a digital ocean droplet - and keeping it running with tmux.

Written on June 29th 2021

Get a Digital Ocean droplet

Set up the Digital Ocean account and a means of payment - the budget for this project is USD 5-7 per month (to keep the droplet running).

Under distributions choose the Ubuntu image - as of writing 20.04 x64
Choose a plan - basic
Choose a cpu option - regular intel
Choose a size - smallest - 1GB and 1 CPU.

Secure the machine - Create a login user to the droplet

To secure the machine and avoid logging in with root I followed this tutorial:
First steps to secure ubuntu server

I didn't enable a firewall - and therefore no need to allow the ssh.
I might want to come back to this later.

The security for this droplet in my setup is mainly coming from using an ssh key.

Install Weechat

To install I followed the instructions on the weechat website

I was using apt command instead of apt-get. You can find a detailed description of the difference here

connect to libera chat

This is well documented in the weechat quickstart.

connect to matrix.org

I followed this description - weechat matrix github

I installed libolm-dev like this:
sudo apt install libolm-dev
It's a cryptographic library needed for matrix.org.

Caveat: It's not quite working yet for me - for some reason I have to reload the script with /script load matrix.py every time I log in to Weechat. If you know what might be the issue here - comments are very much appreciated.

use tmux to keep the session logged in

I am really just scratching the surface here - using it to keep the Weechat session alive when disconnecting.

command to start: tmux
to detach: Ctrl-b d
to reattach: tmux att

More details can be found here