Category: RocketChat

RocketChat server not running. Cancelling

As you might know, I’ve set up a RocketChat server recently on Digital Ocean. So far it’s been working great. An update every once and a while is all it needs.

However, yesterday, I attempted an update that failed. From then on every attempted update resulted in “RocketChat server not running. Cancelling”. This was very frutrating.

First, a few commands to try that might help:

  1. systemctl restart rocketchat.service – This will start your RocketChat server in case it is stopped.
  2. systemctl status rocketchat.service – Use this command to check the results of the previous command. Typically this will report that the service is “Active” if the previous command was successful.

In my case, the second command resulted in a “failed” state. The command itself gave me some information as to what the failure was, but not a lot of context as to what caused the failure. However, it did show me the process that it attempted to run. It said, ExecStart=/opt/nvm/versions/node/v14.19.3/bin/node /opt/Rocket.Chat/main.js (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE).

Alright! We’re getting somewhere. With that I was able to figure out what command failed and where that command was run. I navigated directly to the /opt/Rocket.Chat directory which was where the failure was occurring. From here I ran node main.js. The results of this command were much more helpful. They told me this, Error: Cannot find module '@meteorjs/reify/lib/runtime'. That looks like an issue with npm dependencies.

So, I poked around the Rocket.Chat directory structure and looked for dependencies for the Rocket.Chat server. I found what I was looking for in the /opt/Rocket.Chat/programs/server directory.

From this directory I ran two commands

  1. npm install
  2. npm ci

Afterwards I attempted to start the RocketChat server again using the systemctl restart rocketchat.service command. I checked it with systemctl status rocketchat.service and found that it was working now! RocketChat was back to running normally. The problem with “RocketChat server not running. Cancelling” was gone!

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.