Riot

Riot (formerly known as 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 Riot is to just use the hosted copy at https://riot.im/app. The develop branch is continuously deployed by Jenkins at https://riot.im/develop for those who like living dangerously.

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

1. Download the latest version from https://github.com/vector-im/vector-web/releases
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 Riot!

Note that Chrome does not allow microphone or webcam access for sites served over http (except localhost), so for working VoIP you will need to serve Riot over https.

Important Security Note

We do not recommend running Riot 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 Riot to load and render malicious user generated content from a Matrix API which then had trusted access to Riot (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

Riot 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-web directory: cd vector-web
4. Install the prerequisites: npm install
5. If you are using the develop branch of vector-web, 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 dist 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 dist is not supported on Windows, so Windows users can run npm run build, which will build all the necessary files into the webapp directory. The version of Riot will not appear in Settings without using the dist script. You can then mount the webapp directory on your webserver to actually serve up the app, which is entirely static content.

config.json

You can configure the app by copying config.sample.json to 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.
3. integrations_ui_url: URL to the web interface for the integrations server.
4. integrations_rest_url: URL to the REST interface for the integrations server.
5. roomDirectory: config for the public room directory. This section is optional.
6. roomDirectory.servers: List of other Home Servers' directories to include in the drop down list. Optional.
7. update_base_url (electron app only): HTTPS URL to a web server to download updates from. This should be the path to the directory containing macos and win32 (for update packages, not installer packages).
8. cross_origin_renderer_url: URL to a static HTML page hosting code to help display encrypted file attachments. This MUST be hosted on a completely separate domain to anything else since it is used to isolate the privileges of file attachments to this domain. Default: usercontent.riot.im. This needs to contain v1.html from https://github.com/matrix-org/usercontent/blob/master/v1.html

Running as a Desktop app

Riot can also be run as a desktop app, wrapped in electron. You can download a pre-built version from https://riot.im/download/desktop/ or, if you prefer, built it yourself.

To run as a desktop app:

npm install
npm install electron
node_modules/.bin/electron .

To build packages, use electron-builder. This is configured to output:

• dmg + zip for macOS
• exe + nupkg for Windows
• deb for Linux But this can be customised by editing the build section of package.json as per https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/wiki/Options

See https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/wiki/Multi-Platform-Build for dependencies required for building packages for various platforms.

The only platform that can build packages for all three platforms is macOS:

brew install wine --without-x11
brew install mono
npm install
npm run build:electron

For other packages, use electron-builder manually. For example, to build a package for 64 bit Linux:

npm install
npm run build
node_modules/.bin/build -l --x64

All electron packages go into electron/dist/

Many thanks to @aviraldg for the initial work on the electron integration.

Other options for running as a desktop app:

• https://github.com/krisak/vector-electron-desktop
• @asdf:matrix.org points out that you can use nativefier and it just works(tm)

sudo npm install nativefier -g
nativefier https://riot.im/app/

Development

Before attempting to develop on Riot 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 Riot too.

The idea of Riot 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 Riot forcing matrix-react-sdk to move fast at the expense of maintaining a clear abstraction between the two. Hacking on Riot 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 Riot specific behaviour in the matrix-react-sdk (grep for vector / riot). This separation problem will be solved asap once development on Riot (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 Riot 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 Riot itself.

Setting up a dev environment

Much of the functionality in Riot 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 Riot 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 Riot.

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 Riot 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 Riot.

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)