Matrix Registration Bot

This bot aims to create and manage registration tokens for a matrix server. It wants to help invitation based servers to maintain usability. It does not create a user itself, but allows registration only with a valid token as defined by Matrix standard MSC3231. The benefit is, that an administrator minimizes manual work and does not know a user's password at any time.

This means, that a user that registers on your server has to provide a registration token to successfully create an account. The token can be created by interacting with this bot. So to invite a friend you would send create to the bot which answers with a token. You send the token to the friend, and they can use this to create an account.

The feature was added in Matrix v1.2. More information can be found in the Synapse Documentation .

If you have any questions, or if you need help setting it up, read the troublshooting guide or join #matrix-registration-bot:hyteck.de.

Supported commands

Unrestricted commands

• help: Shows this help

Restricted commands

• list: Lists all registration tokens
• show <token>: Shows token details in human-readable format
• create: Creates a token that that is valid for one registration for seven days
• delete <token> Deletes the specified token(s)
• delete-all Deletes all tokens
• allow @user:example.com Allows the specified user (or a user matching a regex pattern) to use restricted commands
• disallow @user:example.com Stops a specified user (or a user matching a regex pattern) from using restricted commands

Permissions

By default, any user on the homeserver of the bot is allowed to use restricted commands. You can change that, by using the allow command to configure one (or multiple) specific user. Read the simple-matrix-bot documentation for more information. If you get locked out for any reason, simply modify the config.toml that is created in the bots working directory.

Getting started

Prerequisites

Server configuration

Your server should be configured to a token restricted registration. Add the following to your homeserver.yaml:

enable_registration: true
registration_requires_token: true

Create a bot account

Then you need to create an account for the bot on the server, like you would do with any other account. A good username is registration-bot. If you want to use token based login, note the access token of the bot. One way to get the token is to login as the bot and got to Settings -> Help & About -> Access Token in Element.

Once you are finished you can start the installation of the bot.

Manual Installation

The installation can easily be done via PyPi

$ pip install matrix-registration-bot

Configuration

Configure the bot with a file named config.yml. It should look like this

bot:
  server: "https://synapse.example.com"
  username: "registration-bot"
  access_token: "verysecret"
  # It is also possible to use a password based login by commenting out the access token line and adjusting the line below
  # password: "secretpassword"
  prefix: ""
api:
  # API endpoint of the registration tokens
  base_url: 'https://synapse.example.com'
  # Access token of an administrator on the server
  token: "supersecret"
logging:
  level: DEBUG/INFO/ERROR

It is also possible to use environment variables to configure the bot. The variable names are all upper case, concatenated with _ e.g. LOGGING_LEVEL.

Obtaining access tokens

Access tokens are generated per device and when using e.g. Element Web to fetch them, you must not sign out of that session, because otherwise the access token gets invalidated. The simplest method of keeping a session open is to log in to Element Web in a private tab in your browser and getting the token from the Settings > Help & About page. Afterwards just close the tab to leave the device's session usable for the bot.

Usage

Start the bot with

python -m matrix_registration_bot.bot

and then open a Direct Message to the bot. The type one of the following commands.

Systemd

To have the bot start automatically after reboots create the file /etc/systemd/system/matrix-registration-bot.service with the following content on your server. This assumes you use docker and that you place your configuration in /matrix/matrix-registration-bot/config.yml.

[Unit]
Description=matrix-registration-bot
Requires=docker.service
After=docker.service

[Service]
Type=simple

WorkingDirectory=/matrix/matrix-registration-bot
ExecStart=python3 -m matrix_registration_bot.bot

Restart=always
RestartSec=30
SyslogIdentifier=matrix-registration-bot

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

After creating the service reload your daemon and start+enable the service.

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl start matrix-registration-bot
$ sudo systemclt enable matrix-registration-bot

Docker

To use this container via docker you can create the following docker-compose.yml and start the container with docker-compose up -d. Explanation on how to obtain the correct values of the configuration can be found in the Manual installation section.

version: "3.7"

services:
  matrix-registration-bot:
    image: moanos/matrix-registration-bot:latest
    environment:
      LOGGING_LEVEL: DEBUG
      BOT_SERVER: "https://synapse.example.com"
      BOT_USERNAME: "registration-bot"
      BOT_PASSWORD: "password"
      API_BASE_URL: 'https://synapse.example.com'
      API_TOKEN: "syt_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Contributing

Feel free to contribute or discuss this bot at #matrix-registration-bot:hyteck.de or simply open issues and PRs here.

Code of Conduct

Related Projects

• The project is made possible by Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib.
• An alternative for managing tokens is Synapse Admin