Software

Please note that Rocket.Chat Snaps now come with Caddy to deal with the reverse proxy and free SSL certificate’s via Let’s Encrypt – so you may wish to refer to my newer post here. NGINX won’t have websockets configured if you use this guide – which are required if you intend to use the mobile Rocket.Chat apps.

This is a simple tutorial to get Rocket.Chat running on a Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 server (You’ll likely be perfectly fine to run through the same process on a different Ubuntu version such as 18.04 if you’d prefer) In this case we’re installing this on a fresh server and we’ll be installing Rocket.Chat as a Snap and using NGINX as a reverse proxy, as well as setting up an SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt. With this you’ll be able to get Rocket.Chat up and running within ~10 minutes, from there you can go on and make further server configuration changes for security and so on, as well as configure Rocket.Chat in more depth – which won’t be covered within the scope of this tutorial.

Let’s first start with some updates.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Basic UFW setup

Let’s setup a basic firewall using UFW. First install UFW if it’s not installed –

apt-get install ufw

Setup the default access rules –

ufw default deny incoming

ufw default allow outgoing

Setup the firewall rules that we’ll want –

ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp

Enable the firewall –

ufw enable

You can check the status of ufw with –

ufw status

If you add or remove rules you should reload ufw with –

ufw reload

If you need to disable ufw you can do so with –

ufw disable

Install Fail2Ban

apt-get install fail2ban

Install Rocket.Chat as a Snap

Install Snap if it’s not already installed –

apt-get install snapd

Install Rocket.Chat –

snap install rocketchat-server

At this point the Rocket.Chat service will have automatically started, you can check if it’s running with –

service snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-server status

Install and configure NGINX to use as a reverse proxy + SSL setup

Install NGINX –

apt install nginx
systemctl start nginx
systemctl enable nginx

Remove the default NGINX site –

rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Create the NGINX config for Rocket.Chat

vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/rocketchat.conf

Once inside vim, you should have the following (edit “yourserver.com” to be your actual domain that you’re going to use for this server) –

server {
     listen 80;
 
     server_name yourserver.com; 

     location / {
     proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/; 
     }
 }

Enable the new configuration by creating a link to it from /etc/nginx/sites-available/ –

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rocketchat.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Test the configuration –

nginx -t

Assuming no errors are reported, reload the NGINX config with –

nginx -s reload

SSL Setup using Let’s Encrypt + Certbot

Install Certbot and run it –

apt-get install software-properties-common
add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
apt-get update
apt-get install python-certbot-nginx
certbot --nginx

Follow the prompts on screen and you should be issued a valid Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. Make sure you do choose to force a HTTPS redirect when prompted.

Certbot will automatically deal with SSL certificate renewal, a cron will automatically be created under /etc/cron.d/certbot. You can test the renewal process as a dry run via –

certbot renew --dry-run

Certbot will have updated the NGINX configuration, test that the config is valid with –

certbot renew --dry-run

Assuming no errors are reported, reload the NGINX config with –

nginx -s reload

Onto Rocket.Chat itself!

At this point you’ll have a working Rocket.Chat installation running. You can browse to https://yourserver.com and you should be presented with the Setup Wizard screen to create the first user whom will by the Admin by default.

Once logged in, you should get a pop-up stating something along the lines of – The setting Site URL is configured to http://localhost and you are accessing from https://yourserver.com - Do you want to change to https://yourserver.com ? – You’ll want to click YES.

At this stage you’ll want to setup Rocket.Chat itself, so please refer to their documentation here – https://rocket.chat/docs

~Extra~

You can install a Discord style dark theme using this here! https://github.com/0x0049/Rocket.Chat.Dark