Mac OSX

You can set up and configure a Rocket.Chat development environment on your macOS system, whether it’s running on Apple Silicon or non-Apple Silicon chips.

Prerequisites

Install the following:

• Yarn

• Meteor

• Homebrew

• Also, install 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 chip

• 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 a remote to connect your local copy and the original Rocket.Chat repository. This allows you to easily pull updates and bug fixes from the main project without needing to clone it again.

cd 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, check your terminal for a message confirming the successful deployment. The local server will now be running on http://localhost:3000.

If you encounter any issues, see troubleshooting.

Setting up a Rocket.Chat development environment on 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, check your terminal for a message confirming the successful deployment. The local server will now be running on http://localhost:3000.

Modify the code in your IDE to see the changes on the server instance. You can now start contributing to Rocket.Chat. Check out the contribution guide to learn more about the contribution process.

Troubleshooting

➤ 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)

`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 `[email protected]` or older.
See [recent releases](https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/releases) for more information. 

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.

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

(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)