Installing RocketChat on non-internet connected linux environment

Community Support
1

hi all
hoping someone can help me out. really struggling to get rocket chat and its prerequisits installed on Centos 7 or Ubuntu 16.04lts.
im quite new to linux which doesnt help.

the environment has no internet connectivity at all. i was hoping to use rocketchat as a chat and screen share client on our linux, mac and pc clients on that isolated network.

can anyone provide a list of all required components as i keep ending up in a loop of not having a new enough version of either npm or n or nodejs and im unable to get through the install guide on the official page.

i do have mongodb installed and running.
i do have graphics magick installed.

rocket chat just fails to start up or i cant get past this line on the ubuntu guide:
“sudo npm install -g inherits n && sudo n 8.11.3”

n doesnt ever go past v3.02?

help?

2

Bearing in mind your lack of knowledge, you are really going to struggle here.

npm needs internet access I think you will find.

I’d suggest you give your rocket instance some temporary internet outbound access to get it set up. You’ll need to do updates at some point.

Or do it in an isolated environment where you can test.

3

thanks, any advice on where i can learn a bit more about how i can get arround this?
we have an artifactory repo which is set up on the system in question, but i get a version not found error when trying to update n.

im wondering if i can use the artifactory as a proxy some how?

4

if this were me… I would grab a docker image from an internet capable machine and then drop the image on your airgapped machine.

Docker image has all npm dependency already inside as part of the build.

docker save rocketchat/rocket.chat:0.74.3 > rocketchat-docker-image.tar

---

docker load < rocketchat-docker-image.tar

Then follow the normal docker instructions from our docs

Alternatively if snaps are more your speed… They also have all dependencies snapshotted and shipped.

Can find some super old conversation here: Rocket.Chat where we worked with one of our community members that ran the snap in cuba with no internet access. :slight_smile:

I personally would chose docker because its very straight forward.

1 Like
5

Nice info Aaron !!

Seen a few people ask this.

1 Like
6

Thanks great info Aaron. Thank you!
Will try that next week!

7

Hello,

I tried to install Rocket.Chat with docker on a non-connected ubuntu, by transferring the docker containers manually.

However rocket chat fails to setup properly: the setup wizard hangs on the first page, when registering the admin account.

I tried (still with docker) on a regular connected ubuntu and disconnected the network just before validating the admin account, and it hangs as well. When reconnecting the network, the admin account is created without any e-mail validation needed.

What is exactly going on there? Is the setup wizard of rocket chat sending information somewhere?

8

Okay, found it.

When creating the administrator account, Rocket Chat tries to check the domain of the e-mail and also pings the gravatar service (!) to grab a default avatar.

This of course doesn’t work at all when you don’t have an internet connection, and Rocket Chat handles timeouts as being failures, resulting in a complete lockout from the application.

So in order to use Rocket Chat in an offline environment, you need to add the following environment variables in the docker-compose.yml file (service: rocketchat: environment: )

Accounts_UseDNSDomainCheck=False
Accounts_SetDefaultAvatar=False

I had to use wireshark to find what was happening, it should be better documented…