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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. You need to have at least JRE 7 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/AsamK/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/

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.

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:

    $HOME/.config/signal/data/

For legacy users, the old config directory is used as a fallback:

    $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/AsamK/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