Installing Rocket.Chat on Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 via Snap

Friday, March 22, 2019 James

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 Caddy as a reverse proxy. Caddy will also deal with issuing SSL certificates 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.

Initial updates

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
```

Fail2Ban

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
```

Configure Caddy and SSL

Setup the initial caddy config

snap set rocketchat-server caddy-url=https://<your-domain-name>
snap set rocketchat-server caddy=enable
snap set rocketchat-server https=enable
rocketchat-server.initcaddy

Assuming you didn’t have any errors, restart Rocket.Chat and Caddy:

systemctl restart snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-server.service
systemctl restart snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-caddy.service

You can check Caddy’s logs with the following command
```
journalctl -r | grep caddy | less
```

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS is handled in the Caddy configuration by ommitting the http or https prefix. For instance you should have something like this inside /var/snap/rocketchat-server/current/Caddyfile:
```
your-domain-name.com {
    proxy / localhost:3000 {
        websocket
        transparent
    }
}
```

Restart Caddy once again after saving your changes:

systemctl restart snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-caddy

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 may 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!