Setting up federation

Federation is the process by which users on different servers can participate in the same room. For this to work, those other servers must be able to contact yours to send messages.

The server_name configured in the Synapse configuration file (often homeserver.yaml) defines how resources (users, rooms, etc.) will be identified (eg: @user:example.com, #room:example.com). By default, it is also the domain that other servers will use to try to reach your server (via port 8448). This is easy to set up and will work provided you set the server_name to match your machine's public DNS hostname.

For this default configuration to work, you will need to listen for TLS connections on port 8448. The preferred way to do that is by using a reverse proxy: see reverse_proxy.md for instructions on how to correctly set one up.

In some cases you might not want to run Synapse on the machine that has the server_name as its public DNS hostname, or you might want federation traffic to use a different port than 8448. For example, you might want to have your user names look like @user:example.com, but you want to run Synapse on synapse.example.com on port 443. This can be done using delegation, which allows an admin to control where federation traffic should be sent. See delegate.md for instructions on how to set this up.

Once federation has been configured, you should be able to join a room over federation. A good place to start is #synapse:matrix.org - a room for Synapse admins.

Troubleshooting

You can use the federation tester to check if your homeserver is configured correctly. Alternatively try the JSON API used by the federation tester. Note that you'll have to modify this URL to replace DOMAIN with your server_name. Hitting the API directly provides extra detail.

The typical failure mode for federation is that when the server tries to join a room, it is rejected with "401: Unauthorized". Generally this means that other servers in the room could not access yours. (Joining a room over federation is a complicated dance which requires connections in both directions).

Another common problem is that people on other servers can't join rooms that you invite them to. This can be caused by an incorrectly-configured reverse proxy: see reverse_proxy.md for instructions on how to correctly configure a reverse proxy.

Known issues

HTTP 308 Permanent Redirect redirects are not followed: Due to missing features in the HTTP library used by Synapse, 308 redirects are currently not followed by federating servers, which can cause M_UNKNOWN or 401 Unauthorized errors. This may affect users who are redirecting apex-to-www (e.g. example.com -> www.example.com), and especially users of the Kubernetes Nginx Ingress module, which uses 308 redirect codes by default. For those Kubernetes users, this Stackoverflow post might be helpful. For other users, switching to a 301 Moved Permanently code may be an option. 308 redirect codes will be supported properly in a future release of Synapse.

Running a demo federation of Synapses

If you want to get up and running quickly with a trio of homeservers in a private federation, there is a script in the demo directory. This is mainly useful just for development purposes. See demo/README.