How to Install Mattermost 5.2 on Ubuntu 16.04

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Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted alternative to the Slack SAAS messaging service. In other words, with Mattermost, you can setup a private and dedicated messaging server on your own machine for your team.

Prerequisites

• A newly created Ubuntu 16.04 server instance. Say its IP address is 203.0.113.1.
• A sudo user.
• The server instance has been updated to the latest stable status using the EPEL YUM repo.
• A domain mattermost.example.com that has been configured to point to the 203.0.113.1 server instance. You can learn more details about this in another Vultr tutorial.
• In order to automatically obtain the Let's Encrypt certificate, the server instance's FQDN should have been configured as mattermost.example.com.

Use the following commands to update your packages.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Install and configure MySQL

As required by Mattermost, you need to setup a database to store all the data for Mattermost. For that purpose, we will install MySQL.

Use the following command to install MySQL Server.

sudo apt install mysql-server

It will prompt you to choose a password for the root MySQL account,

Then, login to MySQL as root.

mysql -u root -p

Create the Mattermost user mmuser.

mysql> create user 'mmuser'@'%' identified by 'mmuser-password';

Note: Change the password mmuser-password to something more secure.

Create the Mattermost database.

mysql> create database mattermost;

Grant access privileges to the user mmuser.

mysql> grant all privileges on mattermost.* to 'mmuser'@'%';

Finally, log out of MySQL.

mysql> exit

Install and configure Mattermost

Download and extract the Mattermost 5.2 archive.

cd
wget https://releases.mattermost.com/5.2.0/mattermost-5.2.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -zxvf mattermost-5.2.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz

Move all Mattermost files to the /opt directory, and then create a subdirectory /opt/mattermost/data to store program data.

sudo mv mattermost /opt
sudo mkdir /opt/mattermost/data    

Create a dedicated user mattermost and a dedicated group mattermost for running Mattermost.

sudo useradd --system --user-group mattermost

Set the user and group mattermost as the owner of the Mattermost files.

sudo chown -R mattermost:mattermost /opt/mattermost

Give write permissions to the mattermost group.

sudo chmod -R g+w /opt/mattermost

Set up the database driver in the file /opt/mattermost/config/config.json. Open the file.

nano /opt/mattermost/config/config.json

Find these lines.

"SiteURL": "",
"ListenAddress": ":8065",
"DataSource": "mmuser:mostest@tcp(dockerhost:3306)/mattermost_test?charset=utf8mb4,utf8&readTimeout=30s&writeTimeout=30s",

Replace them with the lines below.

"SiteURL": "http://mattermost.example.com",
"ListenAddress": ":80",
"DataSource": "mmuser:<mmuser-password>@tcp(localhost:3306)/mattermost?charset=utf8mb4,utf8&readTimeout=30s&writeTimeout=30s",

Make sure DriverName is set to mysql then set DataSource to the following value, replacing <mmuser-password> with the appropriate value. Also make sure that the database name is mattermost instead of mattermost_test:

Then exit by pressing CTRL+X and then Y to save.

Allow Mattermost to bind to privileged ports, for example, 80 and 443.

cd /opt/mattermost/bin
sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep ./platform
sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep ./mattermost

Create the Mattermost systemd unit file and open it using nano as root.

nano /etc/systemd/system/mattermost.service

Populate it with the following.

[Unit]
Description=Mattermost
After=syslog.target network.target mysqld.service

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/opt/mattermost/bin
User=mattermost
ExecStart=/opt/mattermost/bin/platform
PIDFile=/var/spool/mattermost/pid/master.pid
LimitNOFILE=49152

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Modify permissions on this systemd unit file.

sudo chmod 664 /etc/systemd/system/mattermost.service

Start the Mattermost service and make it automatically start on system boot.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start mattermost.service
sudo systemctl enable mattermost.service

Finally, point your favorite web browser to http://mattermost.example.com or https://mattermost.example.com, and you will see the Mattermost Sign Up page.

On the Mattermost Sign Up page, input an email address, a username, and a password, and then click the Create Account button to register the first user.

Note: Be aware that the first user you register will also be the system administrator.

On the Team Name page and the Team URL page, input a team name and a URL for your first team.

You have now successfully setup a Mattermost messaging server which is robust enough to serve a small or mid-sized team in a production environment. Feel free to explore the interface of Mattermost and invite more team members.