Programming Jabber

jabberd Command-Line Switches

We’ve seen the -h switch to specify the host when starting the server up. There are other switches available on the command line, too; they are listed in Table 3-1.

Table 3-1. Command-line switches

Switch	Relating to	Description
-c	Alternate configuration	Use this to specify an alternative configuration file if you don’t want to use jabber.xml.
-D	Debugging info	Specifying this switch will cause (a large amount of) debugging information to be sent to STDERR.
-h	Hostname	The hostname of the Jabber server.
-H	Home folder	Used to specify “home” folder or directory.
-s	Spool area	The directory where the Jabber server stores data via the xdb_file module.
-v	Show version	Reports Jabber server version and exits.
-V	Show version	Same as -v.
-Z	Debugging info	Limits the debugging information to certain “zones” (comma-separated).[3]
[3] The “zones” are the filenames that immediately follow the timestamp in the debug log records, for example, xdb_file or deliver. Specifying one or more zones will limit debug output to lines that pertain to those zones.

Starting the Jabber server with any unrecognized switches will cause it to show you a list of valid switches:

[yak: ~/jabber-1.4.1]$ ./jabberd/jabberd -badswitch
Usage:
jabberd &
 Optional Parameters:
 -c             configuration file
 -D             enable debug output
 -H             location of home folder
 -v             server version
 -V             server version

Yes, the list that it shows isn’t complete. ...