Mac OSX

You can set up and configure a Rocket.Chat development environment on your macOS system running on Apple Silicon or systems with non-Apple Silicon chips.

Apple Silicon

Preparation Steps

Install Yarn
Install Meteor
Install Homebrew
Install the Node Version Manager (nvm) with this command:

brew install nvm

Confirm that your nvm version is 0.39.2 or higher by running the command nvm --version in your terminal.

Setting up a Rocket.Chat Development Environment on MacOS Apple Silicon

Fork the Rocket.Chat repository on GitHub. Clone the forked repository to your local dev box using this command:

git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/Rocket.Chat.git

Navigate into the project directory and configure an additional remote so we can later fetch updates from the main Rocket.Chat repo with these commands:

git clone https://github.com/your-username/Rocket.Chat
git remote add upstream https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.git

Confirm the Node.js version required by your RocketChat version by executing the following command:

cat package.json | grep -A4 engines | grep node

Install the required version of NodeJS replacing x.x.x with the required NodeJs version number:

nvm install x.x.x

Initialize the meteor framework. This will show the version of meteor requested by Rocket.Chat (located in apps/meteor/.meteor/release). It will also initialize the framework.

cd apps/meteor
meteor --version
cd ../..

Install all needed packages and proceed to build the Rocket.Chat app with these commands:

yarn
yarn build

Start your development server.

For systems with 16 GB of memory or higher, use this command:

yarn dev

For systems with less than 16 GB of memory, use

yarn dsv

Once it is finished, the following output will be displayed on your terminal and the local server will be running on http://localhost:3000.

If you encounter any issues, see Troubleshooting.

Setting up a Rocket.Chat Development Environment Non-Apple Silicon Chips

This setup instruction has been tested on MacBook Pro 2015, 8Gig Ram, 512Gb SSD,i5.

Install Meteor by executing this command:

curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

Meteor comes pre-installed with npm and node, confirm the versions by executing this command:

meteor node -v
meteor npm -v

Install Yarn if it's not already on your system. It 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 your desired NodeJs version.

npm install -g n
n x.x.x
node -v

Replace x.x.x with the NodeJs version number.

Fork the Rocket.Chat repository on GitHub. Clone the forked repository and navigate to the project directory using this command:

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

Navigate to the project root directory and install all the needed packages by executing this command:

cd ../..
yarn

Build and startup your development server by running this command:

yarn build
yarn dev

Once it is finished, the following output will be displayed on your terminal and the local server will be running on http://localhost:3000.

You can modify the code in your IDE and see the changes on the server instance. Now, you can start contributing to Rocket.Chat!

Troubleshooting

Failure linking "fibers" (Apple Silicon)

If yarn is failing on the link step for fibers with a log similar to:

➤ YN0007: │ fibers@npm:5.0.3 must be built because it never has been before or the last one failed
➤ YN0009: │ fibers@npm:5.0.3 couldn't be built successfully (exit code 1, logs can be found here: /private/var/folders/…/build.log)
➤ YN0009: │ fibers@npm:5.0.3 couldn't be built successfully (exit code 1, logs can be found here: /private/var/folders/…/build.log)
➤ YN0009: │ fibers@npm:5.0.3 couldn't be built successfully (exit code 1, logs can be found here: /private/var/folders/…/build.log)

Install node-gyp globally
```
npm install node-gyp --global
```

`node-gyp` introduced breaking changes in Oct 2023 for v10.0.0+ and supports node `^16.14.0 || >=18.0.0`.
If you are experiencing incompatible node version issues because of this, install `node-gyp@9.4.1` or older.
See [recent releases](https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/releases) for more information.

Rebuild fibers for the system architecture manually

cd node_modules/fibers
node-gyp rebuild --arch=arm64

Depending on your `node-gyp` version, it may utilize the `distutils` package, which is deprecated in Python version `3.12`+. If you are
experiencing issues at this step set your Python environment to an older version.

* Copy binary to the correct location

```shell
mkdir bin/darwin-arm64-83
cp build/Release/fibers.node bin/darwin-arm64-83/fibers.node
```

Copy the rebuilt module into meteor

cd ../..
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.

Bcrypt requires arm64 binary but has amd64 one instead (Apple Silicon)

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 everything
```
cd node_modules/bcrypt
make
```

Copy the rebuilt module into meteor

cd ../..
rm -rf apps/meteor/node_modules/bcrypt
cp -r node_modules/bcrypt apps/meteor/node_modules/

Last updated 1 month ago