twelvety

Lots. But the difficulty as ever is finding something that the people you want to talk about are also using.

I use:

• Apache with Letsencrypt client for single host reverse proxies or those with more complex needs. Not the easiest but when you understand it, it’s fine. Lightweight, solid and very flexible.
• NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager), either service or docker, where there’s a lot of proxies on one host. Very simple, very reliable, baked in authentication.
• Traefik, when building or deploying services, especially with docker swarm. Tags make it very smooth once you’ve got things set up and in your workflow.

All are good choices, but each has a specialism that make it a little bit better than the others.

(Breathes in…)

Having spent a large part of today wrestling with a selfhosted mattermost upgrade, it would be nice if they spent a bit of time focusing on making this better, like many other things do. Nothing else, at least since we dropped Atlassian selfhosted apps, has been as consistently poor at this.

Changes to supported databases (not once, but twice), forced migrations, breaking change after breaking change (especially of things that could easily be handled automatically but instead block until you’ve found the log error and researched it), and so on. Support, even for commercial customers, is very poor and sometimes extremely rude (at least one senior dev is very opinionated). And things like arbitratrily restricting how many historical messages you can read without a commercial licence shows a deep disrespect for users, plus random feature creep like adding telephony, who actually uses that?

Compare to Teamcity where you click one link in the ui and are pretty confident stuff will work afterwards, and most other selfhosted apps where major distro specific packages are provided, and add a very rapid release cycle, it’s a lot of work to maintain.

Overall, I’m not convinced that Mattermost is a well run project, foss or not. Major changes in direction smack of poor roadmapping and leadership. It would not surprise me at all if the licence issues in the post turned out to be accidental rather than deliberate.

Seriously, if you’re in the market for a chat app - whether it’s free or a thousands-seat enterprise, pick something else. Almost anything else.