verum-cli

the official command-line client for the Verum encrypted chat system

What can verum-cli do?

verum-cli is a fairly flexible application, especially as it's open source. It's capable of registering you on a Node, updating your public key on your Node, sending a messages, and retrieving and decrypting your messages.

How does it work?

verum-cli commands, mostly, follow the following syntax:

verum-cli <action> [options]

where action is one of the following (though help can be obtained by providing a nonexistant action, or omitting the argument entirely):

Actions

setup

This command sets up Verum-CLI with your Verum ID, password, public key, and private key. This command needs to always be used when you're:

• setting up Verum-CLI
• registering on a Verum Node
• updating your public key on a Verum Node
• switching Verum Nodes

This command takes no arguments, using a tutorial-based structure to get required details.

register

This will register you on the Node node (as determined by your verum id) with the username user (similarly determined), giving you a Verum ID exactly as the one specified as verum id. This may not be successful if a user already exists on the Node with your username, but we'll alert you if that happens. No options are required.

updatepubkey

This will guide you through the process of updating your public key on the Node. No options are required, but beware! that, when asked for your new public key, you must specify the path of an exported ascii armored key file, relative to the path displayed ion the "NOTICE" at the beginning of each client call. .. paths, etc, may be used.

getmsgs

This will retrieve, and attempt to decrypt, all of your received messages from the Node, and display them to you. The same file path warning applies as in updatepubkey. No options are needed.

sendmsg

This command has two required options:

• recipient's verum id
  • the Verum ID of the recipient, as user@node
• message to send
  • the message to be sent. As this is 1 value, your message must be surrounded by quotes ("s), with internal quotes escaped with a backslash (\)

The same file path warning applies as in updatepubkey.

Installation

verum-cli is provided as a Snap Package, so you should install that first.

Then, simply run [sudo] snap install verum-cli to install it. Run snap refresh to update your Snap apps.

What if I need to switch Nodes?

We get it. Sometimes Nodes are compromised, or you're changing your online identity. To change Nodes, just rerun verum-cli setup and verum-cli register. Then, update all your social media etc, and you're set!