signal-cli
signal-cli is a commandline interface for libsignal-service-java. It supports registering, verifying, sending and receiving messages.
To be able to link to an existing Signal-Android/signal-cli instance, signal-cli uses a patched libsignal-service-java, because libsignal-service-java does not yet support provisioning as a slave device.
For registering you need a phone number where you can receive SMS or incoming calls.
signal-cli is primarily intended to be used on servers to notify admins of important events. For this use-case, it has a dbus interface (man page), that can be used to send messages from any programming language that has dbus bindings.
Installation
You can build signal-cli yourself, or use the provided binary files, which should work on Linux, macOS and Windows. For Arch Linux there is also a package in AUR and there is a FreeBSD port available as well.
System requirements:
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at least Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 11
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native libraries: libzkgroup, libsignal-client
Those are bundled for x86_64 Linux, for other systems/architectures see: Provide native lib for libsignal
Install system-wide on Linux
See latest version.
export VERSION=<latest version, format "x.y.z">
wget https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/releases/download/v"${VERSION}"/signal-cli-"${VERSION}".tar.gz
sudo tar xf signal-cli-"${VERSION}".tar.gz -C /opt
sudo ln -sf /opt/signal-cli-"${VERSION}"/bin/signal-cli /usr/local/bin/
You can find further instructions on the Wiki:
Usage
For a complete usage overview please read the man page and the wiki.
Important: The USERNAME is your phone number in international format and must include the country calling code. Hence it should start with a "+" sign. (See Wikipedia for a list of all country codes.)
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Register a number (with SMS verification)
signal-cli -u USERNAME registerYou can register Signal using a land line number. In this case you can skip SMS verification process and jump directly to the voice call verification by adding the --voice switch at the end of above register command.
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Verify the number using the code received via SMS or voice, optionally add
--pin PIN_CODEif you've added a pin code to your accountsignal-cli -u USERNAME verify CODE -
Send a message
signal-cli -u USERNAME send -m "This is a message" RECIPIENT -
Pipe the message content from another process.
uname -a, signal-cli -u USERNAME send RECIPIENT -
Receive messages
signal-cli -u USERNAME receive
Storage
The password and cryptographic keys are created when registering and stored in the current users home directory:
$XDG_DATA_HOME/signal-cli/data/ ($HOME/.local/share/signal-cli/data/)
For legacy users, the old config directories are used as a fallback:
$HOME/.config/signal/data/
$HOME/.config/textsecure/data/
Building
This project uses Gradle for building and maintaining
dependencies. If you have a recent gradle version installed, you can replace ./gradlew with gradle in the following steps.
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Checkout the source somewhere on your filesystem with
git clone https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli.git -
Execute Gradle:
./gradlew build -
Create shell wrapper in build/install/signal-cli/bin:
./gradlew installDist -
Create tar file in build/distributions:
./gradlew distTar
Building a native binary with GraalVM (EXPERIMENTAL)
It is possible to build a native binary with GraalVM.
This is still experimental and will not work in all situations.
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Execute Gradle:
./gradlew assembleNativeImageThe binary is available at build/native-image/signal-cli
FAQ and Troubleshooting
For frequently asked questions and issues have a look at the wiki
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