element-docker-demo/README.md

element-docker-demo

element-docker-demo is a minimal example of how to rapidly stand up a Matrix 2.0 stack on macOS or Linux using Docker, featuring:

• Element Web
• Element Call
• Synapse
• Matrix Authentication Service
• LiveKit
• Postgres
• nginx + letsencrypt / mkcert for TLS.

This is not intended for serious production usage, but instead as a tool for curious sysadmins to easily experiment with Matrix 2.0 in a simple docker compose environment. As of Nov 2024, it's considered beta.

In particular, this has:

• No support, security or maintenance guarantees whatsoever
• No high availability, horizontal scalability, elastic scaling, clustering, backup etc.
• No admin interface
• No monitoring
• No fancy config management (eg ansible), just env vars and templates
• No fancy secret management (stored in plaintext on disk)
• No UDP traffic or TURN for LiveKit (all traffic is tunnelled over TCP for simplicity)
• No integration manager, integrations, or identity lookup server

For production-grade Matrix from Element, please see https://element.io/server-suite (ESS).

To run

Install Docker Compose. Then:

./setup.sh

# Point DNS for *.domain at your docker host,
# Or if running on localhost with mkcert:
# source .env; sudo sh -c echo "127.0.0.1 $DOMAINS >> /etc/hosts"

docker compose up
# go to https://element on your domain.

To configure

Check the .env file, or customise the templates in /data-templates and then docker compose down && docker compose up -d.

In particular, you may wish to:

• Point at your own SMTP server rather than mailhog
• Use your own reverse proxy rather than the provided nginx
• Use your own database cluster

To admin

# To register a user
docker compose exec mas mas-cli -c /data/config.yaml manage register-user

Diagnostics

# check that OIDC is working - useful for debugging TLS problems
docker compose exec mas mas-cli -c /data/config.yaml doctor

Todo

• swap nginx for caddy or traefik to simplify Letsencrypt
• set up livekit TURN (tcp & udp port 443) for better firewall traversal and voip performance