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Dendrite

Dendrite is now maintained at element-hq/dendrite

Dendrite is an open-source Matrix homeserver developed from 2019 through 2023 as part of the Matrix.org Foundation. The Matrix.org Foundation is not able to resource maintenance of Dendrite and it continues to be developed by Element additionally you have the choice of other Matrix homeservers

See The future of Synapse and Dendrite blog post for more information.

Build status Dendrite Dendrite Dev

Dendrite is a second-generation Matrix homeserver written in Go. It intends to provide an efficient, reliable and scalable alternative to Synapse:

Dendrite is beta software, which means:

This does not mean:

Currently, we expect Dendrite to function well for small (10s/100s of users) homeserver deployments as well as P2P Matrix nodes in-browser or on mobile devices.

If you have further questions, please take a look at our FAQ or join us in:

Requirements

See the Planning your Installation page for more information on requirements.

To build Dendrite, you will need Go 1.21 or later.

For a usable federating Dendrite deployment, you will also need:

Also recommended are:

The Federation Tester can be used to verify your deployment.

Get started

If you wish to build a fully-federating Dendrite instance, see the Installation documentation. For running in Docker, see build/docker.

The following instructions are enough to get Dendrite started as a non-federating test deployment using self-signed certificates and SQLite databases:

$ git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
$ cd dendrite
$ go build -o bin/ ./cmd/...

# Generate a Matrix signing key for federation (required)
$ ./bin/generate-keys --private-key matrix_key.pem

# Generate a self-signed certificate (optional, but a valid TLS certificate is normally
# needed for Matrix federation/clients to work properly!)
$ ./bin/generate-keys --tls-cert server.crt --tls-key server.key

# Copy and modify the config file - you'll need to set a server name and paths to the keys
# at the very least, along with setting up the database connection strings.
$ cp dendrite-sample.yaml dendrite.yaml

# Build and run the server:
$ ./bin/dendrite --tls-cert server.crt --tls-key server.key --config dendrite.yaml

# Create an user account (add -admin for an admin user).
# Specify the localpart only, e.g. 'alice' for '@alice:domain.com'
$ ./bin/create-account --config dendrite.yaml --username alice

Then point your favourite Matrix client at http://localhost:8008 or https://localhost:8448.

Progress

We use a script called "Are We Synapse Yet" which checks Sytest compliance rates. Sytest is a black-box homeserver test rig with around 900 tests. The script works out how many of these tests are passing on Dendrite and it updates with CI. As of January 2023, we have 100% server-server parity with Synapse, and the client-server parity is at 93% , though check CI for the latest numbers. In practice, this means you can communicate locally and via federation with Synapse servers such as matrix.org reasonably well, although there are still some missing features (like SSO and Third-party ID APIs).

We are prioritising features that will benefit single-user homeservers first (e.g Receipts, E2E) rather than features that massive deployments may be interested in (OpenID, Guests, Admin APIs, AS API). This means Dendrite supports amongst others:

Contributing

We would be grateful for any help on issues marked as Are We Synapse Yet. These issues all have related Sytests which need to pass in order for the issue to be closed. Once you've written your code, you can quickly run Sytest to ensure that the test names are now passing.

If you're new to the project, see our Contributing page to get up to speed, then look for Good First Issues. If you're familiar with the project, look for Help Wanted issues.