Matrix/Synapse Admin Interface

[ericdrgn]

Sorry if this is in the wrong place (and also if someone has asked this already I couldn't find it), but I found an admin interface that is being worked on for Synapse that allows easy access to some common admin level things that at this point in time are pretty hard to use in this implementation (at least for me). Is there any chance we could potentially add this (hosted through cloudron instead of run locally) and get it integrated with our matrix servers? I understand if we are waiting for the team to officially roll out an admin interface but I don't know how long that will take. Just curious.

https://hub.docker.com/r/awesometechnologies/synapse-admin

[nebulon]

yes that is the right place to bring this up. Adding an admin UI would be great indeed. The git repo for this is apparently https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin

I just wonder how well this will work and stay in-sync with synapse itself?

[girish]

Would be great if a UI is folded into the main project itself. I would think the frontend and backend will eventually go out of sync, no?

[A Former User]

That would be my concern yeah. I suppose it the balance of maintainability of the package and potential quicker release. Imo I'd wait until something like this is integrated into the synapse main project.

[robi]

I just pinged one of my friends over at the Matrix team and this is what he said:

*I wouldn't wait until we add an admin interface of our own as that's not really in the plans for the next 18 months.
We tend to keep our admin APIs fairly stable and warn people when we add backwards-incompatible changes though (lots of people rely on them).

So I think the dangers of the 3rd party dashboard getting out of sync are overblown, as long as the project continues to be maintained.*

[A Former User]

@robi Huh fair enough. I'm all on board for this to be added then.

[ericdrgn]

@girish @nebulon

Any further thoughts on this with the above feedback? I have been able to run that locally myself easily with the instance of Matrix I have setup through Cloudron. Unfortunately I don't know much about all the dev stuff you all go through so I can't say how hard it would be to get that working well through Cloudron. But it took me around 5 minutes to get it running and working for all of my instances of Matrix. Basically once it is setup you just need the single instance and then you specify which Matrix instance you are logging into as an admin. Login will fail if you aren't using an account that has been made a Matrix Server Admin. But basically we would just need a single instance and that single instance could manage any and all Matrix instances even those outside of Cloudron itself.

[girish]

@ericdrgn Since this will most likely get packaged as a separate app, you can open a new post here - https://forum.cloudron.io/category/5/app-wishlist . We simply pick things from there based on interest/upvotes. Aside from that, I think it makes sense to have this packaged .

[ericdrgn]

@girish Done, thanks!

[rbzvr]

@girish Please tell me when the package will be added?
It's just that my crooked hands couldn't install it correctly and I can't log in to the server. Writes the error "session ended".

[ericdrgn]

@rbzvr Did you make sure to follow the documentation to actually make an account an admin? You won't be able to login properly without doing that first.

https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/synapse/#admin

[rbzvr]

@ericdrgn Thank you, you were right, I skipped this step.

[archos]

Hey, just a question. Will the package ever be added to Cloudron? The post is already a year old, so just asking, somehow I can't figure out how to work the API and this would make it pretty easy I think.

[jdaviescoates]

@archos best bet is probably to upvote here:
https://forum.cloudron.io/post/24184

[girish]

@archos I just tested this now. It runs trivially on surfer. All you have to do is:

• Install surfer

• Upload the tarball - https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin/releases/download/0.8.5/synapse-admin-0.8.5.tar.gz

• Extract tarball

• Login with Synapse credentials. Note that the user you are trying to login with has to be Synapse admin. See https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/synapse/#admin on how to do this.

  

[A Former User]

@girish I could see this working as a basic static site app using a small node server to have a dedicated app. Is the concern just if this will continue to be maintained?

[girish]

@atridad I don't know if it's actually that useful. It can only manage (existing) rooms and add users from what I can tell. It's not that full fledged an admin interface as I imagined. But still, if other's consider it useful, this is trivial to package.

[archos]

@girish Thank you for the instructions, it's really simple

[bscabl]

Got this working perfectly via the docker instructions

[aessen]

@girish said in Matrix/Synapse Admin Interface:

@atridad I don't know if it's actually that useful. It can only manage (existing) rooms and add users from what I can tell. It's not that full fledged an admin interface as I imagined. But still, if other's consider it useful, this is trivial to package.

I am running into some issues after having used this tool to set up registration tokens where even as the admin and logged in as the admin, it will not let me delete user data. Is there an easier workaround for this? Note: Not my area of expertise but I am slowly learning and ChatGPT def helps. I am even having trouble using the Surfer CLI to access this because it won't accept my username and password despite being the superadmin.