We package and update .deb packages for PySOGS for Ubuntu 20.04 and newer, and for Debian 10 and newer. If starting out with a new server we recommend either the latest Debian stable release (currently Debian 11) or Ubuntu LTS release (currently 20.04).
Our apt repository includes various dependencies and libraries, but most important are these two packages (only one of which may be installed at a time):
This is the package most simple SOGS setup will want to install. It installs a SOGS that listens on a public IP/port for HTTP connections. It does not support HTTPS connections (but since all messages to/from SOGS are separately encrypted, HTTPS is not particularly recommended anyway).
This package provides a more advanced SOGS configuration where SOGS itself will listen on an internal port and expects to have requests proxied to it from an ngnix or apache2 front-end server that listens on the public IP/port. The package will install basic site configuration files for either nginx or apache2, but extra configuration may be necessary.
This package is required if you want your SOGS to be reached over HTTPS: the HTTPS handling is
configured on the front-end server (i.e. in nginx or apache) using a tool such as certbot. (This
package does not auto-configure such HTTPS certificates, but there are many online help pages on
setting up such HTTPS support for a front-end web server).
If you don't know what any of this means then stick with the sogs-standalone package.
To install the debian packages you need to set up the Oxen apt repository using the following commands (this only needs to be done once on the server, and you may have already done it if you are already using other Oxen deb packages on the server):
# Install the Oxen apt repository public signing key:
sudo curl -so /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/oxen.gpg https://deb.oxen.io/pub.gpg
# Add the Oxen apt repository to your package configuration:
echo "deb https://deb.oxen.io $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oxen.list
# Update package lists:
sudo apt updateand then install ONE of the sogs packages:
sudo apt install sogs-standaloneor
sudo apt install sogs-proxiedThis will install and activate the sogs service.
During installation you will be prompted to enter the public SOGS URL. While you may use your bare IP address here, we recommend instead using a DNS hostname so that your SOGS site can be moved to a different server or ISP in the future: hostnames are easily updated to point to a new location, IP addresses are not.
SOGS has a few options for configuration; the default packages install a configuration file in /etc/sogs/sogs.ini that may be edited to tweak how your SOGS operates. Comments are provided in the file to describe each option.
After changing settings in sogs.ini you need to restart sogs for the changes to take effect using:
sudo systemctl restart sogs.service(which works for both the standalone or the proxied version).
The default sogs installation has no rooms or admins; in order to start using it you must use the command-line tools to set up initial rooms/users. See SOGS Administration for details.
As we develop SOGS we routinely push package updates to the deb repository. To upgrade to the latest version simply run:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgradeNote that this installs all available system package updates (not just SOGS-related packages), which is generally a good thing as there may be security updates for the OS that should be installed as well.
The deb packages automatically upgrading from the previous versions of sogs (which used the package
name session-open-group-server). The procedure is exactly the same as above; during installation
the existing private key will be converted to the format PySOGS expects, and the first time SOGS
(i.e. the new PySOGS code) starts up it will notice that it has an empty database, will detect the
old SOGS databases, and will import all data from them. (The old database files are preserved in
case anything goes wrong).
It is recommended that you make automatic, regular backups of your PySOGS data files. In particular you want to regularly back up everything in /var/lib/session-open-group-server and the main sogs configuration file, /etc/sogs/sogs.ini.