signal-cli/README.md

This fork changes the daemon command to read commands as JSON from stdin instead of exporting a DBus interface. It also includes reactions in JSON output.

Currently, only sendMessage is available. The JSON interface is {"command": "sendMessage", "recipient": number, "content": message, "details": {"attachments": []}}. The details field is optional. As far as I can tell, attachments must be full absolute file paths.

TODOs:

• acknowledge commands received from stdin in valid JSON output instead of freeform text
• feature parity with DBus interface and ideally CLI
• allow typing indicators to be sent and received
• include quotes in JSON output
• ideally, expose message IDs referenced by quotes this is patched such that the daemon command reads recipient:message pairs from stdin instead of exporting an object to dbus while outputing json as normal (though it currently also outputs "sent $msg to $recipient" in response to input as well). it also includes reactions in output, and will include quotes.

note that currently sending multiline messages does not work, lines after the first are ignored.

expect the wiki and builds to be broken for now.

signal-cli

signal-cli is a commandline interface for libsignal-service-java. It supports registering, verifying, sending and receiving messages. To be able to link to an existing Signal-Android/signal-cli instance, signal-cli uses a patched libsignal-service-java, because libsignal-service-java does not yet support provisioning as a slave device. For registering you need a phone number where you can receive SMS or incoming calls. signal-cli is primarily intended to be used on servers to notify admins of important events. For this use-case, it has a dbus interface, that can be used to send messages from any programming language that has dbus bindings.

Installation

You can build signal-cli yourself, or use the provided binary files, which should work on Linux, macOS and Windows. For Arch Linux there is also a package in AUR and there is a FreeBSD port available as well. You need to have at least JRE 11 installed, to run signal-cli.

Install system-wide on Linux

See latest version.

export VERSION=<latest version, format "x.y.z">
wget https://github.com/technillogue/signal-cli/releases/download/v"${VERSION}"/signal-cli-"${VERSION}".tar.gz
sudo tar xf signal-cli-"${VERSION}".tar.gz -C /opt
sudo ln -sf /opt/signal-cli-"${VERSION}"/bin/signal-cli /usr/local/bin/

You can find further instructions on the Wiki:

• Quickstart
• DBus Service

Usage

Important: The USERNAME (your phone number) must include the country calling code, i.e. the number must start with a "+" sign. (See Wikipedia for a list of all country codes.)

• Register a number (with SMS verification)

    signal-cli -u USERNAME register
  

  You can register Signal using a land line number. In this case you can skip SMS verification process and jump directly to the voice call verification by adding the --voice switch at the end of above register command.

• Verify the number using the code received via SMS or voice, optionally add --pin PIN_CODE if you've added a pin code to your account

    signal-cli -u USERNAME verify CODE
  

• Send a message

    signal-cli -u USERNAME send -m "This is a message" RECIPIENT
  

• Pipe the message content from another process.

    uname -a | signal-cli -u USERNAME send RECIPIENT
  

• Receive messages

    signal-cli -u USERNAME receive
  

For more information read the man page and the wiki.

Storage

The password and cryptographic keys are created when registering and stored in the current users home directory:

$XDG_DATA_HOME/signal-cli/data/ ($HOME/.local/share/signal-cli/data/)

For legacy users, the old config directories are used as a fallback:

    $HOME/.config/signal/data/

    $HOME/.config/textsecure/data/

Building

This project uses Gradle for building and maintaining dependencies. If you have a recent gradle version installed, you can replace ./gradlew with gradle in the following steps.

1. Checkout the source somewhere on your filesystem with

    git clone https://github.com/technillogue/signal-cli.git
   

2. Execute Gradle:

    ./gradlew build
   

3. Create shell wrapper in build/install/signal-cli/bin:

    ./gradlew installDist
   

4. Create tar file in build/distributions:

    ./gradlew distTar
   

Troubleshooting

If you use a version of the Oracle JRE and get an InvalidKeyException you need to enable unlimited strength crypto. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6481627/java-security-illegal-key-size-or-default-parameters for instructions.

License

This project uses libsignal-service-java from Open Whisper Systems:

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libsignal-service-java

Licensed under the GPLv3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html