Setting up rocketchat on a UBUNTU 16.04 server

Steps to install on UBUNTU 16.04

1.     Perform the basic install of Unbutu 16.04 server.

Using the default drive sizing settings etc are probably fine, especially if you are testing this.

•         Set an appropriate username (ex.  Administrator)

•         Set the appropriate country

•         Set the appropriate timezone

•         Set Hostname (ex Rocketchat)

2.     When installation is completed, server will reboot.

3.     Log into the server and reboot the box again (Weird Ubuntu thing I’ve encountered in the past)

Reboot [enter]

4.     Box restarts, log in and do the following:

5.     sudo apt-get update

6.     sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

(this will take 30 minutes probably)

7.     sudo snap install rocketchat-server

8.    reboot

9.     If you want to hardcode an IP,  eetup IP address by editing the file:  /etc/network/interfaces/

iface eth0 inet static

address x.x.x.x

netmask x.x.x.x

gateway x.x.x.x

10.  Save your changes

11.  Reboot

By default RocketChat uses port 3000 so, if you want to forward standard :80 port, you can do it with this in UBUNTU with this following commands

sudo iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -d 127.0.0.1 --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3000
sudo iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3000

Done!  You should now be, by default, http://IPofYourServer:3000 and be prompted by a rocketchat webpage.

Register as a new user, this user will automatically become the Administrator user.

You can go in an resign this permission to other users, so its not permanent.

Should you wish to update it.  These commands will help:

"snap find rocketchat-server" will pull the SNAP repository for the latest version.

"sudo snap refresh rocketchat-server" will update your version to the latest.  Takes a minute or so usually to download, the upgrade is under a minute and users probably will just see some "reconnecting" indications if they are logged in, but usually only takes 10-20 seconds for the service to restart.  Everyone will automatically log back in.

If running the above sudo command gives you an error similar to the following:
bla bla bla assumes unsupported features: snapd2.23 

Try the following command:

sudo apt update sudo apt install snapd

The re-run the snap find/snap refresh commands again. You should be good to go.