Deploy with Digital Ocean

Rocket.Chat offers a seamless and user-friendly solution for setting up your own chat platform on Digital Ocean with just a single click. With the 1-Click install from the Digital Ocean marketplace, you can effortlessly launch and configure Rocket.Chat, empowering your team to communicate and collaborate efficiently.

Preparation Steps

Before you begin, make sure you have the following:

• An active Digital Ocean account

• A domain name (optional). You can use Digital Ocean's provided IP address, but having a domain name is recommended for a more professional setup to enable HTTPs.

In this guide, you'll learn how to:

• Deploy Rocket.Chat on Digital Ocean

• Enable HTTPs for your workspace.

Deploy Rocket.Chat on Digital Ocean

To set up Rocket.Chat on Digital Ocean,

• Go to the Rocket.Chat app on the Digital Ocean marketplace and follow the prompts to create the Rocket.Chat droplet.

You can get immediate access to your Rocket.Chat server by visiting http://droplet-ip:3000.

• Create a registered domain name to access Rocket.Chat. Set up an A record from your domain (e.g. chat.mycompany.com) to the droplet's IP address.

• To access your workspace, visit the configured domain on your web browser.

• After successfully setting up the Rocket.Chat droplet and your domain, log in to your droplet using the command below:

ssh root@your_droplet_ip

• Enter your password when prompted. Once you've successfully connected, a message similar to this will appear.:

##################################################################################################################################################################
Rocket.Chat is the leading open source team chat software solution. Free, unlimited and completely customizable with on-premises and SaaS cloud hosting.
Replace email, HipChat & Slack with the ultimate team chat software solution.

This Rocket.Chat image uses docker under the hood. To learn more, please read our docker documentation - https://docs.rocket.chat/deploy/prepare-for-your-deployment/rapid-deployment-methods/docker-and-docker-compose

You can find the compose project in $HOME/rocketchat directory.

Looking for how to use Rocket.Chat? Be sure to check our docs: https://docs.rocket.chat
Need some help? Join our community forums https://forums.rocket.chat and https://open.rocket.chat
##################################################################################################################################################################

Behind the scenes, the image uses Docker to handle the deployment. See Deploy with Docker & Docker Compose to learn how to manage docker deployments.

Enabling HTTPS

It's important to note that Rocket.Chat doesn't have HTTPS enabled by default, as SSL certificates are unique to each installation. However, activating HTTPS with Let's Encrypt certificates can easily be done following the next steps.

To enable HTTPS,

• Ensure the correct A record (optionally CNAME) is set for your domain going to your droplet IP.

• Create a user account without root access using this command:

username= #put your username here

# you can omit docker group, if you do, run the docker commands with sudo
sudo useradd -mG sudo,docker $username
sudo passwd $username # give it a strong password
# copy over the authorized_keys file so that you can ssh into that account directly
sudo cp -r /root/.ssh /home/$username
sudo chown -R $(id $username -u):$(id -g $username) /home/$username/.ssh
sudo su - $username

• Once you can confirm the records update[s] have propagated, copy the rocketchat project directory from the root, and change ownership.

cd ~
sudo cp -r /root/rocketchat .
sudo chown -R $UID:$GID rocketchat
cd rocketchat

• Follow the steps highlighted in the Enable HTTPs section of our docker deployment guide.​