Programming Jabber

The <jabberd:cmdline/> Tag

The <jabberd:cmdline/> tag was mentioned in Chapter 3 as a way of providing a command-line hook into the configuration: values stored in the XML could be overridden by command-line switches used when invoking jabberd.

The tag is used in the standard XML configuration (see Figure 4-3) to allow replacement of the hostname and spool directory:

<host><jabberd:cmdline flag="h">yak</jabberd:cmdline></host>

and:

<spool><jabberd:cmdline flag='s'>./spool</jabberd:cmdline></spool>

In fact, this tag can be used in most places in the XML. So if, for example, you have a requirement to modify (respecify) the error and record log files for each jabberd invocation, you can do something like this:

<log id='elogger'>
  <host/>
  <logtype/>
  <format>%d: [%t] (%h): %s</format>
  <file><jabberd:cmdline flag="e">error.log</jabberd:cmdline></file>
  <stderr/>
</log>

and then override the value error.log with something else at invocation time:

yak:~/jabber-1.4.1$ ./jabberd/jabberd -e error_log.txt &