Moving from Rocketchat to Matrix

Looking for the Open Source Is Awesome Discussion Board?

Me too.  RocketChat recently instituted a weird policy about breaking the mobile and desktop client if you allowed your server version to lag by more than a version or so.  This isn't great when they push out 2 versions in less than a week at times.

Anyway, I was advised by my instance to update my Server. 

Using RocketChat's own Docker Compose and .env example files, I made the necessary modifications, and pointed it to my existing DB.

When it started, errors were in the logs, and really no ways online to fix them.  The only comment was "You should never use 'latest' when updating Docker."  I call B.S. on that, as even RocketChat themselves set "latest" in their docker-compose file.

I've struggled with updates to RocketChat more and more over the past year or so, and it saddens me, as their updates used to be rock solid, and really great. 

All that said, I've decided to move on from RocketChat. Maybe someday they'll be back to a really great open source product, but for me, for now, this is just too much to deal with. 

There will be a New Discussion Server

Not to worry. I'm weighing my options, and looking at what I want to spin up as my new Discussion Server.  Sadly, the chat history is going to be gone (at least until I can find something that can import rocketchat data easily).

Keep checking back at https://discuss.opensourceisawesome.com and at somepoint it should be boasting a new chat system. I'll do my best to support various login methods, but it will greatly depend on what I land on as my new software.

Final Thoughts on This

It sucks, but I also never paid anything to RocketChat, so can't complain too much. The company is fine, their online product probably works fine, but self hosting has become a real second class citizen. Makes me sad, but it is what it is. fortunately, we have an entire world of options out there in the open source space. 

Be patient, I hope this will only take a couple of days. 

Are You Asking, "But what about a backup?"

I did make a backup of all the data before running the update, but I broke my own backup rule of just backing up the whole folder for rocketchat including the data.  That is on me, 100%.   Had I done that, i could have had it back up and running pretty easily.