Add Deno to Rocket.Chat for Apps to work

[jeaninerenee]

@girish Thank you. We appreciate your work.

[foliovision]

RocketChat is becoming really problematic. We only know RocketChat on Cloudron and we are running the 7.2 version. Our iOS apps don't notify reliably and don't keep a persistent login.

Desktop is much better.

We've noticed notifications about limits to the free version of 50 or 25 users (how is this FOSS?) but that doesn't affect us.

The steady degradation of RocketChat (we were delighted with RocketChat already at v3) has been frustrating. It's over ten years of RocketChat for us and it's now almost unusable. We hosted our RocketChat on the development team's paid servers, but the offer kept changing from flat $50/month to per user pricing (that would have affected us negatively at the time). What moved us off the RocketChat servers finally was the insistence on AWS infrastructure.

Keeping our private, open source chat application on the CIA's cloud providers didn't make much sense. It seems to me that outside of the commercial pressure, somehow the American intelligence community entered into a relationship with RocketChat where RocketChat gets some money/support in exchange for making sure everyone's RocketChat can be monitored. All RocketChat installs are federated with the development team server, which at least lets them know who is where and who is sending messages on a given server. That's a lot of information.

After ten years of RocketChat, five of which were very happy, not sure where to go now. Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost or even back to IRC. Or try to keep fighting RocketChat.

My point about fighting RocketChat is that Cloudron should probably be looking for a forked version of RocketChat which doesn't include all this monitoring software and limitations. I'll take a quick check now.

[robi]

@foliovision Look into Revolt, there's an App request for it in this forum as well.

[andreasdueren]

@foliovision All three are good solutions, lattermost probably being the most closed one. Alternatively I can also highly recommend NC Talk

[domi-bue]

With the recent update to Rocket.Chat (2.54.2), app installs are breaking again. This issue did not occur in version 2.54.1.

Below is the error message encountered:

Caused by:
0: Error creating '/app/code/bundle/programs/server/npm/node_modules/@rocket.chat/apps-engine/.deno-cache/npm/registry.npmjs.org/uuid/8.3.2'.
1: Read-only file system (os error 30)

According to this forum post, only the /app/data, /run, and /tmp directories are writable. However, Deno (or Rocket.Chat) attempts to write to /app/code, which is read-only.

Is there a workaround or temporary solution to allow writing to /app/code until this issue is resolved?

[girish]

Writing to code directory is not allowed and we can't support apps which write code at runtime.

Does this happen for any Rocket.chat app?

[domi-bue]

I tested around 10 different apps, and they all tried to write to /app/code. Looks like that Deno tries to install the dependencies there.

[girish]

@domi-bue I pushed a possible fix, can you update and try?

[domi-bue]

Yeah, that fixed it. Thank you for that.

[zigmasdirigeant]

Hi guys, I think we need to revive this post again:

The Rocket.Chat Apps Engine is broken on both Cloudron package versions 3.1.0 (upstream 8.2.1) and 3.2.0 (upstream 8.3.1). No marketplace apps can be installed or run.

Error logs:

error: failed reading lockfile '/app/code/bundle/programs/server/npm/node_modules/@rocket.chat/apps-engine/deno-runtime/deno.lock'

Caused by:

Error getting response at https://registry.npmjs.org/@msgpack/msgpack for package "@msgpack/msgpack": An npm specifier not found in cache: "@msgpack/msgpack", --cached-only is specified.

Root cause:
The deno.lock file is located in /app/code/, which is on the read-only Docker image layer. When Deno tries to resolve the @msgpack/msgpack npm dependency, it can't find it in cache and can't update the lockfile because the filesystem is read-only (Read-only file system, os error 30).

This means the Deno runtime can't start app subprocesses, so all marketplace apps (e.g. Giphy) fail with compiler errors and crash-loop.

Steps to reproduce:
Install or update to Rocket.Chat 3.1.0 or 3.2.0 on Cloudron
Go to Admin > Apps > Marketplace
Try to install any app (e.g. Giphy)
Installation fails with "The App had compiler errors, can not enable it"

Suggested fix:
Either pre-cache the @msgpack/msgpack npm package in the Docker image at build time, or move the Deno cache/lockfile to a writable location (e.g. /app/data/ or /tmp/).

Thanks!