Not too long ago I needed to set up Rocket.Chat for internal evaluation. At the time its installation process was not especially well documented and required some existing knowledge of its underlying stack in order to figure out how to get it running on some of the less supported systems, so there were a few blocks that needed sorting out. After I put together a set of steps for internal use, someone suggested that it might be useful to post externally, so here are the steps I took to get it running as non-root on a Ubuntu 12.04 VM.
Note: At the time of writing Rocket.Chat was in a fairly early stage; these steps will most likely be replaced by far more straightforward installs as it matures and it has already expanded its set of supported environments considerably.
Node install
Rocket.Chat runs on node and I was a little unsure of which particular version I needed. I also wanted to see if it could run without needing root, so I set up nvm first to allow easy switching of node versions and the ability run it as a user account.
First, download and install nvm:
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wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.31.0/install.sh > install-nvm-v0.31.0.sh sh ./install-nvm-v0.31.0.sh |
Relog so that the changes take effect.
As I found out later, the version of Meteor used by Rocket.Chat didn’t support later versions, so using nvm I installed node.js 0.10.42:
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# Set the version of node that we want echo 0.10.42 > .nvmrc # Now install it nvm install |
MongoDB install
For its persistence Rocket.Chat uses MongoDB. Again, to run in user space we need to download and prepare the environment ourselves. Note that this setup runs MongoDB insecurely and these steps need to be modified for an externally visible system.
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# Download and unpack the tarball curl -O https://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.2.3.tgz tar -zxvf mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.2.3.tgz # Create a version-agnostic link ln -s mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.2.3 mongodb # Add the mongodb binaries path to our path echo export 'PATH=$HOME/mongodb/bin:$PATH' >> .bashrc export PATH=$HOME/mongodb/bin:$PATH # Create the data and logs directory mkdir mongodb-data mkdir mongodb-logs # start mongodb mongod --fork --dbpath $HOME/mongodb-data --logpath=$HOME/mongodb-logs/mongo.log --logappend |
To later shut down mongodb:
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mongod --dbpath $HOME/mongodb-data --shutdown |
Finally, Rocket.Chat install
Now, install Rocket.Chat:
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tar zxf /var/www/rchat/rocket.chat-0.18.1.tgz mv bundle Rocket.Chat # Go into the Rocket.Chat server directory and install its dependencies with npm cd Rocket.Chat/programs/server npm install cd ../.. |
Set up its environment variables. These will also need to be added to your .bashrc or similar profile in order to have them next time you login:
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export ROOT_URL=http://your-host-name-as-accessed-from-internet.com:3000/ export MONGO_URL=mongodb://localhost:27017/rocketchat export PORT=3000 |
Now we should be good to go
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cd Rocket.chat node main.js |
Initially I tried to install later versions (v4 and v5) of Node.js before I realised that they weren’t supported. I had some issues that came up, so while the current version of Rocket.Chat doesn’t use these versions it’s worth noting that on Ubuntu 12.04 you need to update gcc and the g++ compilers (v5) (see here for an explanation). This is not necessary for later versions of Ubuntu that should already have them.
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sudo apt-get install python-software-properties sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gcc-5 g++-5 sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-5 80 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-5 sudo update-alternatives --config gcc # choose gcc-5 from the list |