docker-compose

The OER Foundation offers many Free and Open Source Software services to our learners and educators to provide them with resources for learning, developing Open Educational Resources (OER), and collaborating - both professionally and socially - with one another. Due to this proliferation of 'point source' technologies, users have to create a myriad of user accounts, each requesting an email and password and perhaps a user name.

This is another update of my previous posts (installing NextCloud with Collabora Office Online on Ubuntu 16.04 and then NextCloud with OnlyOffice on Ubuntu 18.04). I'm updating it thanks to my colleague in edtech, Stephen Downes' heroic videos showing how he went through this process using my 18.04 instructions on 22.04, running into a few minor issues... this update seeks to remedy the problems he encountered with the older tutorial.

This post is a companion to our video tutorial on installing Rocket.Chat 4.x on an Ubuntu 20.04 server via Docker Compose.

We start with a Docker Compose-configured server. You can also see our video tutorials on how to create one: complete, or starting from a DigitalOcean 'snapshot'.

This tutorial was developed for the Samoan Knowledge Society Initiative, in which the OER Foundation is very pleased to be involved. (Update 2022-02-10: we have also created a video tutorial based on this written tutorial)

At the OER Foundation we host an array of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) services. To keep things manageable, we have established a set of conventions to which we adhere, and I'm describing them here in case it's helpful to others who can either learn from, or improve on, our experience.

The OERu offers accredited tertiary (University level) courses to learners anywhere on the Internet, whether they are using desktop computers or mobile devices.

One of the key requirements of pursuing Good Digital Hygiene is using strong passwords, and a different strong password for every application. This is relatively easy to do in theory, with the aid of clever software, but it's something desperately few people do well in practice. I'm going to explain how I've addressed this issue of digital hygiene for myself, and how you can do it for yourself, and your entire family, social circle, or community.

Because the collaboration of an open community is its real history, I place a high value on backing up the Rocket.Chat servers I'm responsible for, and especially the data they generate, held in MongoDB files (on the host) managed by a MongoDB container.

To do that reliably, I have set up a bash script which does an hourly backup of all MongoDB "databases" and automatically maintains 24 hourly, 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, and 7 yearly snapshots of the databases.

With the recent release of Rocket.Chat 1.0.x (after a couple years undergoing development at a fairly blistering pace), it's time for many of us to upgrade!

Previously, I showed how to install Rocket.Chat via Docker Compose but that was a much earlier version of Rocket.Chat and version 3.4 of MongoDB, which is now quite old (by FOSS standards at least). And it turns out upgrading everything has a few gotchas, so here's how I managed to do it.

Update 2021-11-08: this post is now getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, and I need to update it to use up-to-date components. It might still be useful to folks, but use it with caution. Also, please note, we're using NextCloud with OnlyOffice (the open source community edition) these days. Update 2023-06-14: Here's a new tutorial for Ubuntu 22.04!