How To Install Rocket.Chat on Ubuntu 14.04

Big Disclaimer: This blog post was published Jun 6, 2015 and guess what ? It’s outdated :) The project evolved at a rate that I could not keep up. Thank you for reading and supporting this blog post but I strongly recommend you to check out the official documentation. Have great chats :)

Rocket.Chat is a Web Chat Server, developed in JavaScript, using the Meteor fullstack framework.

It is a great solution for communities and companies wanting to privately host their own chat service or for developers looking forward to build and evolve their own chat platforms.

Since this essay got very popular and since this project is still under development, I’ll try to keep the install instructions updated. Please leave a note or tweet me if you see that the instructions are no longer valid.

This project aims to provide a Slack like chat for teams and collaborations.

If you want to know more about what it can do please refer to the official webpage or GitHub wiki.

While there is a demo online I was not able to wait and I tried to install one instance myself.

Since the process was easy I want to provide you a step by step tutorial on how to install it on your local machine or virtual machine or VPS or where you like most.

I assume that you already have a SSH access or shell login into the machine where we will install an instance of Rocket.Chat

Step 1 — Installing Git

Since we will have to clone the project repository make sure you have git installed:

sudo apt-get install -y git

Step 2 — Installing Docker

To simplify the process we will use Docker to deploy the application.

Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers, by providing an additional layer of abstraction and automation of operating-system-level virtualization on Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

To get the latest Docker package.

$ curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh

The system prompts you for your sudo password. Then, it downloads and installs Docker and its dependencies.

Step 3 — Installing Docker-Compose

Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container applications with Docker. With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

To get the latest version of Docker-Compose:

curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/VERSION_NUM/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > sudo /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Where VERSION_NUM is the number of the latest version of the package, check the release page of the project to see the latest version available.

For example for the version 1.4.2:

curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.4.2/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Step 4— Cloning Rocket.chat

To actual install the chat let’s clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.git

After changing the directory we can start Rocket.Chat

cd Rocket.Chat

using

sudo docker-compose up

After a while you can access to your application on http://localhost:80 or http://server_ip:80

Step 5 — Creating the first user

By default the first user created is also the administrator of the instance.

Happy chat!

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