Mac OSX
You can set up and run a Rocket.Chat development environment on your macOS system.
- brew install nvm
- Important! Make sure you are running nvm version >= 0.39.2nvm --version
- Clone your fork of the Rocket.Chat repository to your local dev box, navigate into the directory, and configure an additional remote so we can later fetch updates from the main Rocket.Chat repo
git clone https://github.com/your-username/Rocket.Chat
cd Rocket.Chat
git remote add upstream https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.git
- Find which version of node your version of RocketChat needs by running.
cat package.json | grep -A4 engines | grep node
- Install the required version of node, for example:
nvm install 14.19.3
- Initialize the
meteor
framework. This will show the version of meteor requested by Rocket.Chat (incidentally, specified inapps/meteor/.meteor/release
) and will initialize it as a side-effect.
cd apps/meteor
meteor --version
cd ../..
- Install all needed packages and build the Rocket.Chat app
yarn
yarn build
- Start your development serverThere are two ways to start the server. For systems with >= 16 GB of memory, useyarn devFor systems with less than 16 GB of memory, useyarn dsv
When done, you should see the following printed on your terminal and the local server running on
http://localhost:3000

This setup instruction has been tested on MacBook Pro 2015, 8Gig Ram, 512Gb SSD,i5
- Install Meteor by executing:
curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh
Meteor comes pre-installed with npm and node, verify by executing:
meteor node -v
meteor npm -v
- Install Yarn if you don't already have it on your system. Yarn is the recommended package manager
npm install --global yarn
Information on the various versions of packages needed can be found in the
package.json
- To easily manage the node versions on your machine, install the n node package manager and switch to the desired node version you want to use
npm install -g n
n 14.18.3
node -v
- Fork and clone the Rocket.Chat repository https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat and navigate into the directory
git clone https://github.com/your-username/Rocket.Chat
cd Rocket.Chat
- Run the following commands to navigate to the
meteor
directory and download the necessary meteor version for Rocket.Chat, as configured in.meteor/release
file
cd apps/meteor
meteor --version
- Back in the main directory, install all the packages by simply running
yarn
- Build and startup your development server by executing
yarn build
yarn dev
When done, you should see the following printed on your terminal and the local server running on
http://localhost:3000

Rocket.Chat server successfully running on macOS
If
yarn
is failing on the link step for fibers with a log similar to:➤ YN0007: │ [email protected]:5.0.3 must be built because it never has been before or the last one failed
➤ YN0009: │ [email protected]:5.0.3 couldn't be built successfully (exit code 1, logs can be found here: /private/var/folders/…/build.log)
➤ YN0009: │ [email protected]:5.0.3 couldn't be built successfully (exit code 1, logs can be found here: /private/var/folders/…/build.log)
➤ YN0009: │ [email protected]:5.0.3 couldn't be built successfully (exit code 1, logs can be found here: /private/var/folders/…/build.log)
- Install
node-gyp
globallynpm install node-gyp --global - Rebuild fibers for the system architecture manuallycd node_modules/fibersnode-gyp rebuild --arch=arm64
- Copy binary to the correct locationmkdir bin/darwin-arm64-83cp build/Release/fibers.node bin/darwin-arm64-83/fibers.node
- Copy the rebuilt module into meteorcd ../..rm -rf apps/meteor/node_modules/fibers/cp -r node_modules/fibers apps/meteor/node_modules/
- Follow the instructions below for fixing a Bcrypt problem, even though its error message has not yet appeared.
The error specifically looks like the following:
(mach-o file, but is an incompatible architecture (have 'x86_64', need 'arm64e')), '/usr/local/lib/bcrypt_lib.node' (no such file), '/usr/lib/bcrypt_lib.node' (no such file)
- Move to the bcrypt directory and rebuild everythingcd node_modules/bcryptmake
- Copy the rebuilt module into meteorcd ../..rm -rf apps/meteor/node_modules/bcryptcp -r node_modules/bcrypt apps/meteor/node_modules/
Last modified 1mo ago