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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

The easiest way to test Vector is to just use the hosted copy at https://vector.im/beta. The develop branch is continuously deployed by Jenkins at https://vector.im/develop for those who like living dangerously.

To host your own copy of Vector, the quickest bet is to use a pre-built released version of Vector:

  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!

Important Security Note

We do not recommend running Vector from the same domain name as your Matrix homeserver. The reason is the risk of XSS (cross-site-scripting) vulnerabilities that could occur if someone caused Vector to load and render malicious user generated content from a Matrix API which then had trusted access to Vector (or other apps) due to sharing the same domain.

We have put some coarse mitigations into place to try to protect against this situation, but it's still not good practice to do it in the first place. See https://github.com/vector-im/vector-web/issues/1977 for more details.

Building From Source

Vector is a modular webapp built with modern ES6 and requires a npm build system to build.

  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 copying vector/config.sample.json to vector/config.json and customising it:

  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, adding an email address to your account, or inviting users via email address will not work. Matrix identity servers are very simple web services which map third party identifiers (currently only email addresses) to matrix IDs: see http://matrix.org/docs/spec/identity_service/unstable.html for more details. Currently the only public matrix identity servers are https://matrix.org and https://vector.im. In future identity servers will be decentralised.

Running as a Desktop app

In future we'll do an official distribution of Vector as an desktop app. Meanwhile, there are a few options:

@asdf:matrix.org points out that you can use nativefier and it just works(tm):

sudo npm install nativefier -g
nativefier https://vector.im/beta/

krisa has a dedicated electron project at https://github.com/krisak/vector-electron-desktop (although you should swap out the 'vector' folder for the latest vector tarball you want to run. Get a tarball from https://vector.im/packages or build your own - see Building From Source above).

There's also a (much) older electron distribution at https://github.com/stevenhammerton/vector-desktop

Development

Before attempting to develop on Vector you must read the developer guide for matrix-react-sdk at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk, which also defines the design, architecture and style for Vector too.

The idea of Vector is to be a relatively lightweight "skin" of customisations on top of the underlying matrix-react-sdk. matrix-react-sdk provides both the higher and lower level React components useful for building Matrix communication apps using React.

After creating a new component you must run npm run reskindex to regenerate the component-index.js for the app (used in future for skinning)

However, as of July 2016 this layering abstraction is broken due to rapid development on Vector forcing matrix-react-sdk to move fast at the expense of maintaining a clear abstraction between the two. Hacking on Vector inevitably means hacking equally on matrix-react-sdk, and there are bits of matrix-react-sdk behaviour incorrectly residing in the vector-web project (e.g. matrix-react-sdk specific CSS), and a bunch of Vector specific behaviour in the matrix-react-sdk (grep for Vector). This separation problem will be solved asap once development on Vector (and thus matrix-react-sdk) has stabilised. Until then, the two projects should basically be considered as a single unit. In particular, matrix-react-sdk issues are currently filed against vector-web in github.

Please note that Vector is intended to run correctly without access to the public internet. So please don't depend on resources (JS libs, CSS, images, fonts) hosted by external CDNs or servers but instead please package all dependencies into Vector itself.

Setting up a dev environment

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.

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-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 the 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.

If any of these steps error with, file table overflow, you are probably on a mac which has a very low limit on max open files. Run ulimit -Sn 1024 and try again. You'll need to do this in each new terminal you open before building vector.

Filing issues

All issues for Vector-web and Matrix-react-sdk should be filed at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/issues

Triaging issues

Issues will be triaged by the core team using the following primary set of tags:

priority: P1: top priority; typically blocks releases. P2: one below that P3: non-urgent P4/P5: bluesky some day, who knows.

bug or feature: bug severity: * cosmetic - feature works functionally but UI/UX is broken. * critical - whole app doesn't work * major - entire feature doesn't work * minor - partially broken feature (but still usable)

 * release blocker

 * ui/ux (think of this as cosmetic)

 * network (specific to network conditions)
 * platform (platform specific)

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 enable the (very experimental) support, check the 'End-to-End Encryption' box in the 'Labs' section of the user settings (note that the labs are disabled on http://vector.im/beta: you will need to use http://vector.im/develop or your own deployment of vector). The Room Settings dialog will then show an 'Encryption' setting; rooms for which you are an administrator will offer you the option of enabling encryption. Any messages sent in that room will then be encrypted.

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