Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD

So couple of days ago I migrated from macOS on Macbook Pro to FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.

Unfortunately, since we are in war, I do not have the time to blog about the migration, although I’m taking notes every day about every change that I do so I can blog later on πŸ™‚

However, one of the biggest concerns for me was running Signal on FreeBSD, as I understnad, Signal people are not interested in supporting the *BSDs.

As any sane person, I started searching the internet for possible solutions and turns out all I need is two pieces of software

The installation is as easy as running

pkg install signal-cli scli

Now for the simple part.

First, you need to link your phone by running

signal-cli link -n "FreeBSD"

It will give an output that says tsdevice:/?uuid=...&pub_key=....

Copy that output, and then in another terminal run

qrencode 'tsdevice:/?uuid=...&pub_key=...' -t ANSI256

You will be represented by a QR Code in the console (cool, aye?).

Using the phone app, link the device by scanning the QR Code.

To receive list of your contacts run

signal-cli -u +myphonenumber receive

Now try to run the TUI interface by running

scli

Side-note: In case you are not able to send or receive messages, you might need to do some DBUS magic.

First, find if you have DBUS running

antranigv@zvartnots:~ $ ps -x -o comm,pid | grep dbus
dbus-launch         53571
dbus-daemon         54064
dbus-daemon         54963

Then, you will need to find the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable, this is usually set in the DBUS child process, in our case, it’s 54963, so we can use procstat as root

root@zvartnots:~ # procstat -e 54963
  PID COMM             ENVIRONMENT                                          
54963 dbus-daemon      SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash DBUS_STARTER_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c DISPLAY=:0.0 WMAKER_BIN_NAME=wmaker PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/home/antranigv/bin WINDOWPATH=9 MAIL=/var/mail/antranigv GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c USER=antranigv DBUS_STARTER_BUS_TYPE=session MM_CHARSET=UTF-8 WRASTER_COLOR_RESOLUTION0=4 PWD=/usr/home/antranigv BLOCKSIZE=K LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LOGNAME=antranigv HOME=/home/antranigv

Okay! we have our variable!

Now, we need to set the ENV and we are done, if you use (t)csh then execute

setenv DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c

If you are using bash, run the following

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-TaY0zoKZIb,guid=4f518f874f97170e788a94fb5fa14a3c

Now, you can run scli again and it will work fine πŸ™‚

Happy Chatting!@#$%

That’s all folks! πŸ™‚

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