15 ms·

Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Mattermost just needs (AFAIK) a relational database. Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI ha

Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Mattermost just needs (AFAIK) a relational database. Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI has far too much wasted whitespace. Like 85% of the page is navigation. I like open source competitors to incumbents but maybe just copy Github here - no one is gonna say anything.

teen 9y ago
A relational database is overkill. My BBCode-enabled chatroom runs off txt files.
- zingmars 9y ago
  Mattermost isn't exactly a simple bbcode-enabled chatroom though. They have support for multiple projects, an API etc. Achieving this with just text files would be quite the headache.
  - omnimus 9y ago
    They also have horrible android client and you have to pay for mobile notifications. I ended up using matrix/riot instead. Much better clients and grows nicely.
    - it33 9y ago
      Hi omnimus, thanks for the mention. Mattermost has a brand new, open source Android client in beta written in React Native used by thousands of testers: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost.react.native&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost... It's greatly improved from the original version and official release is this month. Mattermost mobile notifications aren't a commercial feature, they are just off by default due to privacy (push notifications appear on a mobile device when the device is locked). Go to System Console > Notifications > Mobile Push > Send Push Notifications to enable. You can also deploy your own Mattermost Push Notification Server (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy) and compile your own Mattermost Android and iOS apps (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile) for total control.
      - zingmars 9y ago
        Sadly the Android's react version seems to lack any share features - the app doesn't appear in any 'share to' dialogues, nor can I share pictures or such from the app itself (For example using rocket.chat I can long press on an image and I will be able to share the picture to other apps). The issue appears to only have around 100 combined votes on uservoice (https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/13689738-receive-simple-share-from-other-apps https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge... + https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/15142020-share-to-mattermost-on-android https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...) so I'm not holding my breath for this to be implemented anytime soon, but it would be a really useful feature to have for when you need to move graphical assets around and you want to take a quick look on your phone for example.
suprememoocow 9y ago
Hi, co-founder of Gitter here. Gitter is not intended to be a replacement for Mattermost, Slack or other team collaboration tools. We see Gitter as a community instead. As such, we're not expecting to see a huge uptake of on-site installations, so the list of required services (es, neo etc) is big compared to other products focused on on-prem. We're hoping that our users will contribute to the main site, Gitter.im. Obviously, we're also totally happy with users running their own Gitter installations but, while we would like it to be easy, ease-of-installation of a production instance is not a goal currently.
- marmaduke 9y ago
  > we would like it to be easy, ease-of-installation of a production instance is not a goal currently. ok but doesn't it behoove you anyway to have e.g. dockerfile and/or ansible roles for dev/staging environments?
  - corney91 9y ago
    They probably do have some sort of automation, but it's likely specific to their environment.
    - suprememoocow 9y ago
      We use Ansible / packer & terraform. Open sourcing this repo will be fairly complicated but it may make more sense for us to publish a k8s helm chart or more complete, production-ready docker-compose.yml
      - sandGorgon 9y ago
        you are already using docker-compose.yml. you should use definitely do a production ready docker swarm deployment. you only will need to do incremental changes to your docker-compose
  - kobeya 9y ago
    Make a merge request.
amelius 9y ago
> Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI has far too much wasted whitespace. And why do I always need to scroll down to see the project README?
- Sujan 9y ago
  You mean exactly like with Github? Solution: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/READ...
  - amelius 9y ago
    But now I'm having problems with the length of the URL :) PS: yes, same problem with github
- smarx007 9y ago
  There is a small hack on Gitlab for that actually: right under the textbox with the clone URI there is a link to the README. Files (209 MB) / Commits (44,194) / ... / Readme / MIT License / Contribution guide / ...
- Ralfp 9y ago
  Personally, I'm finding myself far more often interested in project's main files/dirs update dates that project's readme.
  - harperlee 9y ago
    Perhaps a two column layout for big wide screens would be best. That would cater for both use cases.
romanovcode 9y ago
Gitlab UI is the worst. I hope they do less features and just fix their god-awful UI for once!
- Blahah 9y ago
  Interesting (and rude). I think it's much better than any other group chat app. Especially for groups organised around code projects.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    I was talking about GitLab, not Gitter. Yes it's rude, but I want to love GitLab - it's amazing. However I just can't bring myself over with this UI. It's just too bad and too unintuitive. Also slow.
    - Blahah 9y ago
      Oh, sorry I missed that you said GitLab. It's less rude if you're not commenting on the open sourcing of a project to just say negative stuff about it :) I have to use GitLab for work and I find the UI much harder to use than GitHub, so I agree there. But, it's open source and we can all contribute, and in particular the best place to make your feelings know about the UI is constructively in the issue tracker. Here's the main issue sparked from the last HN discussion about GitLab UI: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752
    - melicerte 9y ago
      From my own experience, Gitlab is fast for as long as u have sufficient RAM available. It becomes slow when the SWAP is hitted.
    - lloeki 9y ago
      > Also slow. Only on gitlab.com, on prem here it flies.
      - 9y ago
e12e 9y ago
This is actually the first real project I've come across that uses neo4j - thank you for pointing that out. Given the requirements, I actually think this project looks rather clean between the docker-compose-file and the npm dependencies. I very much doubt it can compete with Mattermost or Rocket.chat for self-host for small organizations - but I'm really happy to see this thing open sourced! I much prefer it to be opened up as soon as possible, and then flicked on later. If there's one thing I'd like to see (beyond a reduction in what appears to be a default of three? mongodb instances) - it would probably be a set of juju charms for bringing the thing up under lxc/lxd on Ubuntu. I just revisited the combination of juju+ubuntu+lxd - and while I was skeptical when juju was introduced, it appears to be a rather sane toolkit for automating deployment IMNHO. For those interested, if you start here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/08/lxd-2-0-lxd-and-juju/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/08/lxd-2-0-lxd-and-juju/ you might think that this thing is insane overkill - but if you start at the beginning of the series[s], you will (or I did) get a warm fuzzy feeling about how much fun it is to play with lxd on top of zfs. I suppose some people think docker is just as fun (and warm and fuzzy) - but I don't know. LXD does feel like it combines the good parts of linux with the good parts of bsd jails. [s] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/14/the-lxd-2-0-story-prologue/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/14/the-lxd-2-0-story-pro...
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  (Gitter Co-founder here) Unfortunately our neo4j setup as it stands really doesn't scale. At an application-level we're built error-handling to gracefully handle the frequent outages we experience running it. These are probably our fault, rather than a failing in the product, but I've wanted to replace the current neo4j-based suggestion algo with a new one that uses batching/clustering for a while. As soon as I get a chance, I would like to remove the dependency we have on neo4j.
  - Communitivity 9y ago
    You might want to reach out to Al Baker or Kendall Clark at Stardog. Their product is more RDF centric than for generic graphs like Neo4j, but is in my opinion a much better product. They have a community version, and have open sourced several pieces, but it is commercial. https://www.stardog.com/docs/ https://www.stardog.com/docs/ If you want pure Open Source then Titan might be a good fit for Gitter. http://titan.thinkaurelius.com/ http://titan.thinkaurelius.com/
akerro 9y ago
> Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Not really. Why? Reddit is opensource but it'd damn hard to setup correctly and start your own instance.
- oblio 9y ago
  Just because Reddit does it rather badly does not mean that other OSS projects shouldn't try to do better.
  - akerro 9y ago
    >Just because Reddit does it rather badly What about other OSS project? It's also not easy to make Linux from scratch. Being OSS doesn't mean it will be single click to run your instance.
    - oblio 9y ago
      Linux doesn't really have to since 99% of users use distributions, not LFS. And there's a difference between gratuitous (or almost gratuitous) dependencies and must have ones. From what I read in the other comments Neo4J doesn't feel like a must-have for this project. Plus, to be honest, Mongo, Neo4J, Redis AND Elastic Search? That's got to be overkill :)
- bpicolo 9y ago
  The reddit repo doesn't have any commits since March. If that's their actual codebase, what are all their engineers doing?
  - _ps6d 9y ago
    It's not the actual codebase, it's kind of a branch that has to be manually updated (by cherry-picking across commits from the "real" one). It used to be kept in pretty close sync with the code live on the site, but it seems like they don't care about updating it any more. There are things that have been live on the site for close to a year now that aren't in the open-source repo.
cmatija 9y ago
Hiya, Sorry to hear you're displeased with our UI. We'd love to hear any suggestions you might have. We're always looking to improve as much as we can. You can open an issue in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
ishitatsuyuki 9y ago
Matrix is also quite good on this. Homeserver and PSQL (and maybe nginx), done.
bdcravens 9y ago
> Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order They do provide a docker-compose.yml, which you can use in Docker Swarm, ECS, etc to stand up the entire stack.

teen 9y ago

A relational database is overkill. My BBCode-enabled chatroom runs off txt files.

zingmars 9y ago
Mattermost isn't exactly a simple bbcode-enabled chatroom though. They have support for multiple projects, an API etc. Achieving this with just text files would be quite the headache.
- omnimus 9y ago
  They also have horrible android client and you have to pay for mobile notifications. I ended up using matrix/riot instead. Much better clients and grows nicely.
  - it33 9y ago
    Hi omnimus, thanks for the mention. Mattermost has a brand new, open source Android client in beta written in React Native used by thousands of testers: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost.react.native&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost... It's greatly improved from the original version and official release is this month. Mattermost mobile notifications aren't a commercial feature, they are just off by default due to privacy (push notifications appear on a mobile device when the device is locked). Go to System Console > Notifications > Mobile Push > Send Push Notifications to enable. You can also deploy your own Mattermost Push Notification Server (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy) and compile your own Mattermost Android and iOS apps (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile) for total control.
    - zingmars 9y ago
      Sadly the Android's react version seems to lack any share features - the app doesn't appear in any 'share to' dialogues, nor can I share pictures or such from the app itself (For example using rocket.chat I can long press on an image and I will be able to share the picture to other apps). The issue appears to only have around 100 combined votes on uservoice (https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/13689738-receive-simple-share-from-other-apps https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge... + https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/suggestions/15142020-share-to-mattermost-on-android https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...) so I'm not holding my breath for this to be implemented anytime soon, but it would be a really useful feature to have for when you need to move graphical assets around and you want to take a quick look on your phone for example.

suprememoocow 9y ago

Hi, co-founder of Gitter here. Gitter is not intended to be a replacement for Mattermost, Slack or other team collaboration tools. We see Gitter as a community instead. As such, we're not expecting to see a huge uptake of on-site installations, so the list of required services (es, neo etc) is big compared to other products focused on on-prem. We're hoping that our users will contribute to the main site, Gitter.im. Obviously, we're also totally happy with users running their own Gitter installations but, while we would like it to be easy, ease-of-installation of a production instance is not a goal currently.

marmaduke 9y ago
> we would like it to be easy, ease-of-installation of a production instance is not a goal currently. ok but doesn't it behoove you anyway to have e.g. dockerfile and/or ansible roles for dev/staging environments?
- corney91 9y ago
  They probably do have some sort of automation, but it's likely specific to their environment.
  - suprememoocow 9y ago
    We use Ansible / packer & terraform. Open sourcing this repo will be fairly complicated but it may make more sense for us to publish a k8s helm chart or more complete, production-ready docker-compose.yml
    - sandGorgon 9y ago
      you are already using docker-compose.yml. you should use definitely do a production ready docker swarm deployment. you only will need to do incremental changes to your docker-compose
- kobeya 9y ago
  Make a merge request.

amelius 9y ago

> Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI has far too much wasted whitespace. And why do I always need to scroll down to see the project README?

Sujan 9y ago
You mean exactly like with Github? Solution: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/READ...
- amelius 9y ago
  But now I'm having problems with the length of the URL :) PS: yes, same problem with github
smarx007 9y ago
There is a small hack on Gitlab for that actually: right under the textbox with the clone URI there is a link to the README. Files (209 MB) / Commits (44,194) / ... / Readme / MIT License / Contribution guide / ...
Ralfp 9y ago
Personally, I'm finding myself far more often interested in project's main files/dirs update dates that project's readme.
- harperlee 9y ago
  Perhaps a two column layout for big wide screens would be best. That would cater for both use cases.

romanovcode 9y ago

Gitlab UI is the worst. I hope they do less features and just fix their god-awful UI for once!

Blahah 9y ago
Interesting (and rude). I think it's much better than any other group chat app. Especially for groups organised around code projects.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  I was talking about GitLab, not Gitter. Yes it's rude, but I want to love GitLab - it's amazing. However I just can't bring myself over with this UI. It's just too bad and too unintuitive. Also slow.
  - Blahah 9y ago
    Oh, sorry I missed that you said GitLab. It's less rude if you're not commenting on the open sourcing of a project to just say negative stuff about it :) I have to use GitLab for work and I find the UI much harder to use than GitHub, so I agree there. But, it's open source and we can all contribute, and in particular the best place to make your feelings know about the UI is constructively in the issue tracker. Here's the main issue sparked from the last HN discussion about GitLab UI: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752
  - melicerte 9y ago
    From my own experience, Gitlab is fast for as long as u have sufficient RAM available. It becomes slow when the SWAP is hitted.
  - lloeki 9y ago
    > Also slow. Only on gitlab.com, on prem here it flies.
    - 9y ago

e12e 9y ago

This is actually the first real project I've come across that uses neo4j - thank you for pointing that out. Given the requirements, I actually think this project looks rather clean between the docker-compose-file and the npm dependencies. I very much doubt it can compete with Mattermost or Rocket.chat for self-host for small organizations - but I'm really happy to see this thing open sourced! I much prefer it to be opened up as soon as possible, and then flicked on later. If there's one thing I'd like to see (beyond a reduction in what appears to be a default of three? mongodb instances) - it would probably be a set of juju charms for bringing the thing up under lxc/lxd on Ubuntu. I just revisited the combination of juju+ubuntu+lxd - and while I was skeptical when juju was introduced, it appears to be a rather sane toolkit for automating deployment IMNHO. For those interested, if you start here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/08/lxd-2-0-lxd-and-juju/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/08/lxd-2-0-lxd-and-juju/ you might think that this thing is insane overkill - but if you start at the beginning of the series[s], you will (or I did) get a warm fuzzy feeling about how much fun it is to play with lxd on top of zfs. I suppose some people think docker is just as fun (and warm and fuzzy) - but I don't know. LXD does feel like it combines the good parts of linux with the good parts of bsd jails. [s] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/14/the-lxd-2-0-story-prologue/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/14/the-lxd-2-0-story-pro...

suprememoocow 9y ago
(Gitter Co-founder here) Unfortunately our neo4j setup as it stands really doesn't scale. At an application-level we're built error-handling to gracefully handle the frequent outages we experience running it. These are probably our fault, rather than a failing in the product, but I've wanted to replace the current neo4j-based suggestion algo with a new one that uses batching/clustering for a while. As soon as I get a chance, I would like to remove the dependency we have on neo4j.
- Communitivity 9y ago
  You might want to reach out to Al Baker or Kendall Clark at Stardog. Their product is more RDF centric than for generic graphs like Neo4j, but is in my opinion a much better product. They have a community version, and have open sourced several pieces, but it is commercial. https://www.stardog.com/docs/ https://www.stardog.com/docs/ If you want pure Open Source then Titan might be a good fit for Gitter. http://titan.thinkaurelius.com/ http://titan.thinkaurelius.com/

akerro 9y ago

> Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Not really. Why? Reddit is opensource but it'd damn hard to setup correctly and start your own instance.

oblio 9y ago
Just because Reddit does it rather badly does not mean that other OSS projects shouldn't try to do better.
- akerro 9y ago
  >Just because Reddit does it rather badly What about other OSS project? It's also not easy to make Linux from scratch. Being OSS doesn't mean it will be single click to run your instance.
  - oblio 9y ago
    Linux doesn't really have to since 99% of users use distributions, not LFS. And there's a difference between gratuitous (or almost gratuitous) dependencies and must have ones. From what I read in the other comments Neo4J doesn't feel like a must-have for this project. Plus, to be honest, Mongo, Neo4J, Redis AND Elastic Search? That's got to be overkill :)
bpicolo 9y ago
The reddit repo doesn't have any commits since March. If that's their actual codebase, what are all their engineers doing?
- _ps6d 9y ago
  It's not the actual codebase, it's kind of a branch that has to be manually updated (by cherry-picking across commits from the "real" one). It used to be kept in pretty close sync with the code live on the site, but it seems like they don't care about updating it any more. There are things that have been live on the site for close to a year now that aren't in the open-source repo.

cmatija 9y ago

Hiya, Sorry to hear you're displeased with our UI. We'd love to hear any suggestions you might have. We're always looking to improve as much as we can. You can open an issue in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

ishitatsuyuki 9y ago

Matrix is also quite good on this. Homeserver and PSQL (and maybe nginx), done.

bdcravens 9y ago

> Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order They do provide a docker-compose.yml, which you can use in Docker Swarm, ECS, etc to stand up the entire stack.