Looking for an internal communication/collaboration platform for your teams? Jack Wallen shows how easy it is to deploy Mattermost as a virtual appliance.
Mattermost is a solid, open source option for team communication and collaboration. You can choose to go with the official hosted Mattermost service, or you can deploy a Mattermost server on your local data center or to a remote cloud host.
SEE: 40+ Open Source and Linux Terms You Should Know (Tech Republic Premium)
I want to show you how to quickly deploy a Mattermost instance as a virtual machine. I’ll demonstrate using VirtualBox, but you can always deploy the service through your virtual machine technology of choice.
One thing to note is that the Mattermost service you implement will not have all the features found in the official hosted version. This version of Mattermost is specifically aimed at communication. The good news is that this service is implemented with installable service/feature plug-ins such as:
- agenda
- AWS SNS
- CircleCI
- Confluence
- Digital Ocean
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Jenkins
- Guard
- skype
- webex
- Zoom
Before you can add those plugins and integrations, you need to implement Mattermost first and that’s exactly what I’m going to show you.
What you need
To successfully deploy Mattermost as a virtual machine, you need a running instance of your VM Manager. As I said before, I’ll be demonstrating with VirtualBox. If you’re using a different VM technology, you’ll need to adapt the deployment instructions to your virtual platform.
Let’s start.
Deploy Mattermost as a virtual machine
The first thing to do is download the virtual device built by the developers of Out-of-the-box Linux† For VirtualBox you will want the . to download VM file, which has the extension .ova. The file is only 688 MB, so it’s not too big.
Once the file has been downloaded, open VirtualBox and click File | Import device. In the resulting window (Image A), click the file button to the right of the File text area and locate the .ova file you just downloaded.
Image A
Click Next and in the resulting window (Figure B), make sure to adjust all the options you want (such as Name, CPU, and RAM).
Figure B
Click Import to start the process. When the import is complete, start the VM. When the virtual machine boots up, you will be prompted to configure a few items (such as a password for the root account–Figure C†
Figure C
You must also:
- Create a password for the Postgres account.
- Create a password for the administrator account.
- Configure an email address for the administrator account.
- Configure a domain to serve Mattermost.
At the end of the wizard (Figure D), you can skip the Hub services initialization.
Figure D
Finally, add an email for system notifications (Figure E†
Figure E
After you verify that email address, you will be asked if you want to configure automated security updates (Figure F†
Figure F
Go ahead and enable the automated security updates by tapping Install and pressing Enter on your keyboard.
The installation gets underway in earnest and you can sit back and watch the output fly by. The process will take a few minutes and you will be prompted to reboot (Figure G†
Figure G
After the reboot is complete, you will be presented with a screen with all the URLs from which you can access the various Mattermost components (figure H†
figure H
Congratulations, you now have an active instance of Mattermost that you can use for internal communication and collaboration.
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