How to run Slack alternative Mattermost in 5 minutes on Layershift Jelastic PaaS!

Mattermost is self-hosted team communication service bringing messaging and file sharing into one place, accessible across PCs and phones, with archiving and search. It integrates with an array of applications and because it is an open source project, you can build whatever new functionality you need atop its core features.

Although the Mattermost developers publish a Docker image, they do not recommend it for production deployment. So we’ve done the hard work for you and created a pre-packaged production-ready Mattermost environment using nginx and postgres nodes.

To install Mattermost, simply log into your Jelastic Dashboard, open Marketplace and search for ‘mattermost’:

You will be then asked to choose a database, user, and password which we’ll then create for you on postgres and pre-configure for Mattermost setup:

Installation is fully automated and takes just a few minutes, and then you are ready to start customising Mattermost for your team!

You can now invite your colleagues, create channels and even connect Mattermost to your Github installation!

What’s included?

Some of Mattermost’s features include:

Messaging & Files

• Send messages and comments across public, private and 1-1 channels
• Personalize notifications for unreads and mentions by source
• Share files and images internally and externally

Anywhere Access

• Use Mattermost from web-enabled PCs and phones
• Attach sound, video and image files from mobile devices
• Define team-specific branding and color themes across your devices

Personalization

• Four present themes, two light, two dark
• Unlimited custom themes with over 18 individual color setting options
• Imports theme colors from Slack accounts

Integrations:

• Slack-compatible webhooks make it easy to adapt Slack apps to Mattermost
• Open Source integrations service give you complete control over formatting and delivery

And many, many more! For full list of features, head to Mattermost website.

Upgrade procedure

Mattermost upgrade procedure on our platform differs a little from the official documentation. In order to upgrade your installation correctly:

• Log into your Mattermost environment via Jelastic SSH Gateway and enter the Nginx node.

• Once there, download Mattermost release you want to upgrade your installation to:

wget https://releases.mattermost.com/X.X.X/mattermost-team-X.X.X-linux-amd64.tar.gz

You can check the release number of the latest Mattermost at the download page.

• Extract downloaded archive:

tar -xvzf mattermost-team-X.X.X-linux-amd64.tar.gz

• Backup your config.json file:

nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $ cp /var/www/webroot/ROOT/config/config.json /var/www/webroot/

• Stop Mattermost process. Since our installation relies on supervisor to control the mattermost process, you have to issue the following commands:
  1) Make sure supervisor and mattermost are running:
  nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $ supervisorctl -c /var/www/supervisord.conf status
mattermost RUNNING pid 2777, uptime 0:09:40
  2) Stop mattermost process:
  nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $ supervisorctl -c /var/www/supervisord.conf stop mattermost
mattermost: stopped
• Copy the extracted archive contents to mattermost webroot:

nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $ cp -r mattermost/* /var/www/webroot/ROOT/
nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $cp config.json /var/www/webroot/ROOT/config/

• Restart mattermost process:

nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $ supervisorctl -c /var/www/supervisord.conf restart mattermost
mattermost: ERROR (not running)
mattermost: started
nginx@node125908-mattermost ~ $ supervisorctl -c /var/www/supervisord.conf status mattermost
mattermost RUNNING pid 2889, uptime 0:00:02

• If your mattermost fails to restart, you can check it’s logs at

  /var/log/nginx/mattermost.log

  to get details on the issue.

Additional upgrade procedures are described in the official Mattermost documentation.

How much does it cost?

Mattermost itself is an open source, self-hosted Slack alternative – so you only pay the hosting cost.

The unique consumption based charging model on our Jelastic PaaS – only pay for server resource usage, not server instance size – means the hosting costs are tiny, even though you have the added privacy and security of your own servers dedicated to this application.

In our tests, Mattermost uses just 1 cloudlet for nginx, and also just 1 cloudlet for postgres, so expect to pay around £8 per month – an absolute bargain for the advanced security and integration possibilities available by using Mattermost!

This new marketplace application is available as part of our service offering to you, so our 24×7 support team are ready to help you with any install issues, and of course our inclusive backups and robust SLAs continue to apply as normal to all environments that you launch on our Jelastic platform.