Note

This is a community-maintained fork 42wim/matterbridge, because there is not a lot of activity upstream and lots of bugfixes were not merged.

Get involved now and become a maintainer for your favorite network/protocol!

matterbridge

A simple chat bridge
Letting people be where they want to be with the magic of interoperability.

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matterbridge is a solution to connect users on different platforms/protocols, allowing them to chat in the best conditions possible. Despite the name, Mattermost isn't required to run matterbridge.

Warning

This fork has edited the history of the project to remove ~100MB of vendoring. This will faciliate review of new PRs, see community/#5 for the reasons why we did this and how to make sure we didn't introduce backdoors in this process.

Features

Many features are available, but not all of them are supported on all protocols:

• Bridge many rooms from supported protocols
• Message threads/topics, and replies
• Attachments, file uploads, and inline images
• Transparent bridging with spoofed usernames and avatars
• Private groups

The complete and up-to-date list of supported protocols is in docs/protocols/. Additionally, we have an API for 3rd party integration if you'd like to add a custom bridge without implementing it in this codebase.

Getting started with matterbridge

Get matterbridge up-and-running in a few minutes in 3 simple steps:

• Setting up matterbridge (see docs/compiling.md for compiling from source)
• Configuring matterbridge
• Running matterbridge (CLI or as a systemd service)

Documentation

See docs/ folder in this repository.

Contributing

You are welcome to submit pull requests, report bugs and request new features. matterbridge is a volunteer-run project and you are expected to behave with respect for the maintainers and other users. In particular, harassment and hate speech are not welcome.

For more development guidelines, see docs/development/.

Version policy

matterbridge requires go 1.26. The required go version may be bumped at any time, but we will always wait at least 1 month after a golang release before bumping our requirements.

While we would like to support older golang releases in order to target older distros, the problem is we have many upstream dependencies with many different versioning policies. go has no LTS version, and promises backwards-compatibility. See this issue for more discussion on the topic.

Please note it is still possible to compile matterbridge on stable distros such as Debian stable, just not with the distro-packaged compiler. You will need to use official golang binaries, or nix/guix packages, etc.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 license since after commit 20988f6446c6ad3ea416044712e634d3ed85ee53. It was relicensed following discussion in commmunity/#10. Apart from the obvious advantages of copyleft to promote innovation and cooperation, in very practical terms, we had to use either GPL or AGPL to include the whatsappmulti bridge in official builds and deprecate the broken legacy whatsapp bridge. When contributing to matterbridge development, you agree that your contributions will be published under that license.

Commits up-to 20988f6446c6ad3ea416044712e634d3ed85ee53 remain available under the looser Apache License 2.0.

Chat with us

Questions or want to see the bridge in action? Join us on:

• federated networks: Jabber/XMPP, Matrix
• non-free centralized networks: Discord
• self-hostable centralized networks: #matterbridge on irc.f-hub.org:6697 or Libera.chat
• Other: Telegram

Related projects

• jwflory/ansible-role-matterbridge (Ansible role to simplify deploying Matterbridge)
• matterbridge autoconfig
• matterbridge config viewer
• matterbridge-heroku
• mattermost-plugin - Run matterbridge as a plugin in mattermost

Thanks

Matterbridge wouldn't exist without amazing libraries, without @42wim who started the project, and without the 100+ contributors who participated in this adventure. See docs/credits.md for more complete credits.