FOSS Community Edition – offline use question

Description

Hello everyone,

I’m new to Rocket.Chat and setting up Community Edition (self-hosted, FOSS) for our company.

I noticed the workspace goes read-only until registered with Rocket.Chat Cloud.

My question:

Do I need a continuous internet connection to keep it fully functional, or is a one-time registration enough so it can run offline in a LAN?

Thanks a lot for any guidance!

— Michał

You can have ONE air-gapped Starter workspace without having to contact sales.

Starter is free for up to 50 users. Any more and it will go read only.

You will HAVE to have a properly registered and paid for instance for airgapped with more than 50 users.

You MUST follow that precisely - the instance has to be completely airgapped during installation. It if detects ANY connectivity at all it will fail.

It will not apply to Community Edition - CE - no matter how many users.


A general note regarding ‘FOSS’ for anyone reading - don’t shoot the messenger as I don’t work for Rocket.

All the Rocket code is open source. You can read all the source, including the EE parts. That’s what open source means. The source is open to read.

However, the EE parts are strictly licenced for use. Different thing entirely.

The remainder of the code is MIT licenced - you can do with it as you wish.

But note. The BUILT versions of Rocket.Chat - be that CE, Starter, etc have licensing restrictions for use. Yup, they are built from the open source code, but that doesn’t make them open source themselves.

CE is a BUILT version of Rocket.Chat and has various limitations.

If you really want a ‘FOSS’ version then you need to get the source code, run the fossify script, remove any other bits you don’t like, and then build and deploy yourself.

You may not like this - many don’t, despite their business profiting from the use of Rocket - and rail against it. Rocket.Chat has to make some money somewhere to pay the devs to develop the code. They do not work for free (and neither do you).

And no, donations just do not work. Tried that. Failed. (I also help on a small linux server distro - we get by on donations JUST because we all work for free in our spare time - the donations just about cover the backend infra costs and that’s it - it would never cover a single devs wages)

Hope that clarifies it a bit - I need to do a proper post on this at some point.

I would like to clarify the user limit policy in different Rocket.Chat versions.

As I understand:

  • Community Edition (CE) has a limit of up to 50 users, after which the instance becomes read-only.

  • There is a possibility to run a custom FOSS build, compiled from source after removing EE modules (fossify).

My question is:

:backhand_index_pointing_right: If I use a self-built FOSS version in my company, am I still bound by the 50-user limit, or does this limit apply only to the pre-built Community Edition?

There is no user limit in CE, but it lacks some features.

CE may struggle over 200 users due to limitations of node, not Rocket. It doesn’t matter how it is built. Licenced versions can run microservices which help with higher user numbers.

Starter is pretty well fully featured, and free up to 50 users. Over that I think it reverts to CE.

If you want to build from source you can remove the EE code and then do whatever you like.