NAME

signald —

Daemon to facilitate communication via Signal Private Messenger

SYNOPSIS

pkg install signald

DESCRIPTION

Signald is an unofficial utility for interacting with Signal. It is a Java based daemon that is running in the background and is communicated to over a socket.

This man page documents how the FreeBSD port is installed and how to get started. It assumes that the signald package was already installed, e.g., from the FreeBSD package repo as described in SYNOPSIS.

GETTING STARTED

To enable and start the service, run as root

service signald enable
service signald start

Check log output:

cat /var/log/signald/signald.log

Install signaldctl, a command line tool that allows interacting with the service:

pkg install go
go install gitlab.com/signald/signald-go/cmd/signaldctl@latest

LINKING A DEVICE

To link an existing device (phone), first enter

~/go/bin/signaldctl account link

then do "Select Linked Devices -> Link New Device" in the Signal smartphone app's menu and scan the QR code shown on your terminal.

REGISTERING A DEVICE

WARNING: This disconnects other devices using the same MSISDN.

Open your web browser and enable developer mode
Go to https://signalcaptchas.org/registration/generate.html
Solve the captcha
Depending on your browser you are redirected to a URL starting with "signalcaptcha://" or it can be seen in the web developer console - everything after "//" is the captcha.

~/go/bin/signaldctl account register [msisdn] --captcha [captcha]

msisdn is your full mobile phone number with country code, e.g., +123456789.

You will receive a text message containing a verification code on the MSISDN specified in the registration call above. Use this verification code

~/go/bin/signaldctl account verify [msisdn] [code]

to complete the registration.

SENDING A MESSAGE

Use this command to send a message

~/go/bin/signaldctl message send -a [msisdn_from] [msisdn_to] [msg]

You can also send a message to yourself when using a linked device, which will show up in "Note to Self", but not cause a notification, e.g.,

~/go/bin/signaldctl message send -a +123456789 +123456789 "Beep beep"

FILES

/var/db/signald: Signald database.
/var/log/signald/signald.log: Signald log output.
/var/run/signald/signald.sock: Socket to communicate with signald, world writable.

AUTHORS

This manual page was written by Michael Gmelin <grembo@FreeBSD.org>.