Month: June 2022

Getting Started with Rocket Chat Using Digital Ocean Backing

Note – RocketChat is making moves to severely limit their PAAS offering. They have baked in a bunch of limitations in the codebase and now claim that if you self-host you are using their “free version” 🤦

RocketChat (https://rocket.chat) is a chatting tool similar to MatterMost and Slack. It offers a self-managed community edition as well as some paid plans and is in active development. I’m just learning how to use it, so I’m planning on documenting my journey here.

I installed and set up RocketChat installed in a matter of minutes. The QuickStart guide, though short, includes most of what you need to get up and running.

To get started with your RocketChat instance on DigitalOcean you need to:

  1. Create a DigitalOcean account
  2. Install RocketChat
  3. Create an A Record that points to your Digital Ocean Droplet. *
  4. Setup your Let’s Encrypt certificate.
    rocketchatctl configure --lets-encrypt --root-url=YOUR_DOMAIN --letsencrypt-email=YOUR_EMAIL
  5. Update your RocketChat installation. Run the following commands from your droplet command line interface.
    1. Run sudo rocketchatctl upgrade-rocketchatctl
    2. Run sudo rocketchatctl update

* I use Cloudflare to host my DNS. In this case I had to disable the proxying on the A Record in order to allow RocketChat to work correctly.

Now visit your site (you should not run into any problems) and create your administration account.

One Note

From time to time the Rocket Chat server responds with “Bad Gateway”. I’m not sure exactly why. However, a DigitalOcean droplet can be restarted by using the reboot command from the command line interface.