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Vector/Web

Vector is a Matrix web client built using the Matrix React SDK (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk).

Getting Started

Vector is a modular webapp built with modern ES6 and requires and npm build system to build. Instructions for building are below, but building from source shouldn't be necessary for simple deployments.

  1. Download the latest version from https://vector.im/packages/
  2. Untar the tarball on your web server
  3. Move (or symlink) the vector-x.x.x directory to an appropriate name
  4. If desired, copy config.sample.json to config.json and edit it as desired. See below for details.
  5. Enter the URL into your browser and log into vector!

Building From Source

If you do wish to build vector from source:

  1. Install or update node.js so that your npm is at least at version 2.0.0
  2. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/vector-im/vector-web.git
  3. Switch to the vector directory: cd vector-web
  4. Install the prerequisites: npm install
  5. If you are using the develop branch of vector, you will probably need to rebuild one of the dependencies, due to https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/3055: (cd node_modules/matrix-react-sdk && npm install)
  6. Configure the app by copying config.sample.json to config.json and modifying it (see below for details)
  7. npm run package to build a tarball to deploy. Untaring this file will give a version-specific directory containing all the files that need to go on your web server.

Note that npm run package is not supported on Windows, so Windows users can run npm run build, which will build all the necessary files into the vector directory. The version of Vector will not appear in Settings without using the package script. You can then mount the vector directory on your webserver to actually serve up the app, which is entirely static content.

config.json

You can configure the app by modifying the config.json file:

  1. default_hs_url is the default home server url.
  2. default_is_url is the default identity server url (this is the server used for verifying third party identifiers like email addresses). If this is blank, registering with an email address or adding an email address to your account will not work.

Development

Much of the functionality in Vector is actually in the matrix-react-sdk and matrix-js-sdk modules. It is possible to set these up in a way that makes it easy to track the develop branches in git and to make local changes without having to manually rebuild each time.

[Be aware that there may be problems with this process under npm version 3.]

First clone and build matrix-js-sdk:

  1. git clone git@github.com:matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk.git
  2. pushd matrix-js-sdk
  3. git checkout develop
  4. npm install
  5. npm install source-map-loader # because webpack is made of fail (https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/1472)
  6. popd

Then similarly with matrix-react-sdk:

  1. git clone git@github.com:matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk.git
  2. pushd matrix-react-sdk
  3. git checkout develop
  4. npm install
  5. rm -r node_modules/matrix-js-sdk; ln -s ../../matrix-js-sdk node_modules/
  6. popd

Finally, build and start vector itself:

  1. git clone git@github.com:vector-im/vector-web.git

  2. cd vector-web

  3. git checkout develop

  4. npm install

  5. rm -r node_modules/matrix-js-sdk; ln -s ../../matrix-js-sdk node_modules/

  6. rm -r node_modules/matrix-react-sdk; ln -s ../../matrix-react-sdk node_modules/

  7. npm start

  8. Wait a few seconds for the initial build to finish; you should see something like:

    Hash: b0af76309dd56d7275c8
Version: webpack 1.12.14
Time: 14533ms
         Asset     Size  Chunks             Chunk Names
     bundle.js   4.2 MB       0  [emitted]  main
    bundle.css  91.5 kB       0  [emitted]  main
 bundle.js.map  5.29 MB       0  [emitted]  main
bundle.css.map   116 kB       0  [emitted]  main
    + 1013 hidden modules

    Remember, the command will not terminate since it runs the web server and rebuilds source files when they change. This development server also disables caching, so do NOT use it in production.

  9. Open http://127.0.0.1:8080/ in your browser to see your newly built Vector.

When you make changes to matrix-js-sdk or matrix-react-sdk, you will need to run npm run build in the relevant directory. You can do this automatically by instead running npm start in each directory, to start a development builder which will watch for changes to the files and rebuild automatically.

If you add or remove any components from the Vector skin, you will need to rebuild the skin's index by running, npm run reskindex.

Enabling encryption

End-to-end encryption in Vector and Matrix is not yet considered ready for day-to-day use; it is experimental and should be considered only as a proof-of-concept. See https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-162 for an overview of the current progress.

To build a version of vector with support for end-to-end encryption, install the olm module with npm i https://matrix.org/packages/npm/olm/olm-0.1.0.tgz before running npm start. The olm library will be detected and used if available.

To enable encryption for a room, type

/encrypt on

in the message bar in that room. Vector will then generate a set of keys, and encrypt all outgoing messages in that room. (Note that other people in that room will send messages in the clear unless they also /encrypt on.)

Note that historical encrypted messages cannot currently be decoded - history is therefore lost when the page is reloaded.

There is currently no visual indication of whether encryption is enabled for a room, or whether a particular message was encrypted.