Description

When Prosody receives a stanza from a connected client or remote server, called an “origin”, it enters the routing process via prosody.core_process_stanza(), where some authorization and sanity checks are performed. If the origin session is not authorized to send stanzas yet, i.e. because it has not authenticated or bound a resource, it is rejected here.

Processing then passes to prosody.core_post_stanza(), where events are fired to dispatch the stanza to handling by interested modules. If modules generate a reply of some sort, that often gets sent directly to the origin session, bypassing most routing logic.

Stanzas created by Prosody itself, i.e. in modules, enter routing trough prosody.core_post_stanza(). Modules should use the module:send() API which in turn calls core_post_stanza behind the scenes.

API

TL;DR:

-- Stanza received from e.g. a connected client
prosody.core_process_stanza(origin, stanza);

-- Fire events for stanza received from a client
prosody.core_post_stanza(origin, stanza, true);

-- Send a stanza out from Prosody
prosody.core_post_stanza(origin, stanza, false);

-- Similar to the above
prosody.core_route_stanza(origin, stanza);