Mattermost is a free Slack alternative – it’s open source, and self hosted! You can host your own Mattermost server within a Linux VPS from a VPS provider such as RackNerd.

In this new era of working and collaboration, an internal chat platform is so crucial for the growth of an organization. There are many that exist today, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. However, if you’re after a self-hosted opensource solution, you should consider Mattermost! It includes advance features such as file sharing and integrations as well.

Here are some features of Mattermost:

• Opensource
• Elegant desgin and fast
• This is widely appreciated.
• Exciting integrations
• Supports multi language
• Secure communication
• Supports major cloud platform
• Nginx integration

It’s time to look at the installation procedures of Mattermost on a Linux server:

Log in to the server and open a terminal and switch to root (sudo -i)

1. You will need to download the latest version of Mattermost by using the wget utility:

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

NB : x.x.x.x replace with version number. You can find the latest/current version number on the Mattermost website.

2. Extract the package

tar xvzf *.gz

3. Create a directory for storage

mkdir /opt/mattermost/data

4. You need to create a user for Mattermost and set the necessary permissions:

useradd –system –user-group mattermost

chown -R mattermost:mattermost /opt/mattermost

chmod -R g+w /opt/mattermost

5. Now it is the time to configure the database.

“mmuser:@tcp(:3306)/mattermost?charset=utf8mb4,utf8&readTimeout=30s&writeTimeout=30s”

Start the Mattermost server as the user mattermost and enable it to boot upon system boot:

sudo -u mattermost ./bin/mattermost
systemctl enable mattermost

6. Start the Mattermost server using the below command.

sudo start mattermost

7. Ensure Mattermost is running by visiting the below URL on your web browser (replacing VPSIP with your VPS IP address).

http://VPSIP:8065

You have successfully installed Mattermost Server! Just configure admin on the web browser URL.