---
title: Obtaining the source
---

Prosody is open-source, under the [MIT](/source/mit) license. This means
that the source code is freely available to download and use however you
wish. You may modify the source code, and link it with closed-source
applications. That said, we politely request that you do consider
sending code improvements to us at the developer [mailing
list](/discuss#mailing_list).

The full terms of the license are [available here](/source/mit).

# Downloading a release tarball

The latest release, along with OpenPGP signatures and older release
archives can be found under [Downloads → Source](/downloads/source/).

Latest release
:   [`prosody-_LATESTRELEASE.tar.gz`](/downloads/source/prosody-_LATESTRELEASE.tar.gz)
    [signature](/downloads/source/prosody-_LATESTRELEASE.tar.gz.asc)

# Downloading a snapshot (tarball) {#downloading_a_snapshot_tarball}

The current development source can always be downloaded from
[here](https://hg.prosody.im/trunk/archive/tip.tar.gz).

The current and past releases are available in our [downloads
section](/download/start).

# Browsing the source {#browsing_the_source}

The source repositories of all our active branches is available to
browse at [hg.prosody.im](https://hg.prosody.im/).

RSS and Atom feeds are available. An XMPP feed is available on request
(you may see it in action in our [chatroom](/discuss#chatroom)).

# Checking out with Mercurial {#checking_out_with_mercurial}

If you want to help out with development, or simply want an easy way to
keep up to date with the latest source, we strongly recommend you use
[Mercurial](https://www.mercurial-scm.org/), which is available on most
Linux distributions. On Windows we recommend
[TortoiseHg](https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/).

After installing you need to \"clone\" our repository, which creates a
copy on your system under a folder named \"prosody-hg\":

``` {.code}
 hg clone https://hg.prosody.im/trunk prosody-hg
```

Subsequent updates can be downloaded simply by running:

``` {.code}
 hg pull -u
```

inside the \"prosody-hg\" folder.

# Building and installation {#building_and_installation}

For full instructions on how to get things running see [Installing from
source](/doc/installing_from_source).