signal-cli

signal-cli is a commandline interface for libsignal-service-java. It supports registering, verifying, sending and receiving messages. To be able to receiving messages signal-cli uses a patched libsignal-service-java, because libsignal-service-java does not yet support registering for the websocket support. For registering you need a phone number where you can receive SMS or incoming calls. It 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.

Usage

usage: signal-cli [-h] [-u USERNAME] [-v] {register,verify,send,quitGroup,updateGroup,receive} ...

• Register a number (with SMS verification)

    signal-cli -u USERNAME register
  

• Register a number (with voice verification)

    signal-cli -u USERNAME register -v
  

• Verify the number using the code received via SMS or voice

    signal-cli -u USERNAME verify CODE
  

• Send a message to one or more recipients

    signal-cli -u USERNAME send -m "This is a message" [RECIPIENT [RECIPIENT ...]] [-a [ATTACHMENT [ATTACHMENT ...]]]
  

• Pipe the message content from another process.

    uname -a | signal-cli -u USERNAME send [RECIPIENT [RECIPIENT ...]]
  

• Groups

• Create a group

     signal-cli -u USERNAME updateGroup -n "Group name" -m [MEMBER [MEMBER ...]]
  

• Update a group

     signal-cli -u USERNAME updateGroup -g GROUP_ID -n "New group name"
  

• Send a message to a group

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

DBus service

signal-cli can run in daemon mode and provides an experimental dbus interface. For dbus support you need jni/unix-java.so installed on your system (Debian: libunixsocket-java ArchLinux: libmatthew-unix-java (AUR)).

• Run in daemon mode (dbus session bus)

      signal-cli -u USERNAME daemon
  

• Send a message via dbus

      signal-cli --dbus send -m "Message" [RECIPIENT [RECIPIENT ...]] [-a [ATTACHMENT [ATTACHMENT ...]]]
  

System bus

To run on the system bus you need to take some additional steps. It’s advisable to run signal-cli as a separate unix user, the following steps assume you created a user named signal-cli. These steps, executed as root, should work on all distributions using systemd.

cp data/org.asamk.Signal.conf /etc/dbus-1/system.d/
cp data/org.asamk.Signal.service /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/
cp data/signal.service /etc/systemd/system/
sed -i -e "s|%dir%|<INSERT_INSTALL_PATH>|" -e "s|%number%|<INSERT_YOUR_NUMBER>|" /etc/systemd/system/signal.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable signal.service
systemctl reload dbus.service

Then just execute the send command from above, the service will be autostarted by dbus the first time it is requested.

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.

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