This documentation is out of date!

This documentation site is for the versions of Dendrite maintained by the Matrix.org Foundation (github.com/matrix-org/dendrite), available under the Apache 2.0 licence.

If you are interested in the documentation for a later version of Dendrite, please refer to https://element-hq.github.io/dendrite/.

Enabling registration

Enabling registration allows users to register their own user accounts on your Dendrite server using their Matrix client. They will be able to choose their own username and password and log in.

Registration is controlled by the registration_disabled field in the client_api section of the configuration. By default, registration_disabled is set to true, disabling registration. If you want to enable registration, you should change this setting to false.

Currently Dendrite supports secondary verification using reCAPTCHA. Other methods will be supported in the future.

reCAPTCHA verification

Dendrite supports reCAPTCHA as a secondary verification method. If you want to enable registration, it is highly recommended to configure reCAPTCHA. This will make it much more difficult for automated spam systems from registering accounts on your homeserver automatically.

You will need an API key from the reCAPTCHA Admin Panel. Then configure the relevant details in the client_api section of the configuration:

client_api:
  # ...
  registration_disabled: false
  recaptcha_public_key: "PUBLIC_KEY_HERE"
  recaptcha_private_key: "PRIVATE_KEY_HERE"
  enable_registration_captcha: true
  captcha_bypass_secret: ""
  recaptcha_siteverify_api: "https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify"

Open registration

Dendrite does support open registration — that is, allowing users to create their own user accounts without any verification or secondary authentication. However, it is not recommended to enable open registration, as this leaves your homeserver vulnerable to abuse by spammers or attackers, who create large numbers of user accounts on Matrix homeservers in order to send spam or abuse into the network.

It isn’t possible to enable open registration in Dendrite in a single step. If you try to disable the registration_disabled option without any secondary verification methods enabled (such as reCAPTCHA), Dendrite will log an error and fail to start.