Add Deno to Rocket.Chat for Apps to work

[domi-bue]

To ensure full functionality of Rocket.Chat, especially for app support, please consider adding Deno to the Docker container. Since Deno is now a requirement, it’s essential for apps to function correctly.

---

Server Details:

+-----------------------------------------------+ 
|                 SERVER RUNNING                | 
+-----------------------------------------------+ 
|                                               | 
|  Rocket.Chat Version: 7.0.0                   | 
|       NodeJS Version: 20.17.0 - x64           | 
|      MongoDB Version: 6.0.13                  | 
|       MongoDB Engine: unknown                 | 
|             Platform: linux                   | 
|         Process Port: 3000                    | 
|             Site URL: https://rocket.chat     | 
|     ReplicaSet OpLog: Enabled                 | 
|          Commit Hash: dfc7e0e874              | 
|        Commit Branch: HEAD                    | 
|                                               | 
+-----------------------------------------------+ 

Note: The URL has been modified for privacy.

---

Error Stack Trace:

The following logs indicate the issue encountered when Deno is not present in the container:

appsEngine:runtime:deno:c95ba73a-0485-4d12-ae8a-a3e68330065a Setting up app subprocess +0ms
...
Failed to startup Deno subprocess Error: spawn deno ENOENT
at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:286:19)
at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:484:16)
at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:82:21) {
errno: -2,
code: 'ENOENT',
syscall: 'spawn deno',
path: 'deno',
spawnargs: [
'run',
'--allow-net',
'--allow-read=/app/code/bundle/programs/server/npm/node_modules/@rocket.chat/apps-engine,/app/code/bundle/programs/server/npm/node_modules',
'--allow-env=NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS',
'/app/code/bundle/programs/server/npm/node_modules/@rocket.chat/apps-engine/deno-runtime/main.ts',
'--subprocess',
'c95ba73a-0485-4d12-ae8a-a3e68330065a'
]
}

[nebulon]

I have added deno to the package for the moment at https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/rocketchat-app/-/commit/7cbeed49142d7a7616b7c7f2ebe63c37a54b6d5f

But won't release a package yet, since I wasn't able to install any marketplace app due to various javascript exceptions thrown. But at least the deno error is gone. Strange system this.

[jeaninerenee]

Hello. Thank you for this. I have a client with Rocket.Chat on Cloudron, and since Rocket.Chat Release 7.0.0, we are unable to install any of the Rocket.Chat Marketplace Apps. When we attempt various ways to enable or install them, we receive errors such as "Timeout: app process not ready" and "The App had compiler errors, can not enable it." As a result, we have not been able to upgrade to Rocket.Chat 7.0 and beyond since the Marketplace Apps that we use are essential for us.

Is this topic related to this issue and/or have others had problems using the Marketplace Apps in Rocket.Chat on Cloudron? I did deploy Rocket.Chat with Docker on my own server apart from Cloudron, and the Marketplace App installations work as intended, so this appears to only be isolated to my client's Rocket.Chat on Cloudron.

Is this a known issue, and if it is, is there a fix in queue?

Thank you for your help.

[girish]

@jeaninerenee we have opened an issue internally for fixing this. Will update when we have a fix.

[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.