After several weeks of development, the launch of the new version of the messaging system Mattermost 5.25 which is positioned as an LTS version (extended support version) and which offers many bug fixes for greater stability and which also focused on ensuring communication between developers and company employees.
For those unfamiliar with Mattermost, you should know that this is positioned as an open alternative to the Slack communication system and allows you to receive and send messages, files and images, track your conversation history and receive notifications on your smartphone or PC.
In addition to it supports out-of-the-box integrations, and a large collection of native modules is provided to integrate with Jira, GitHub, IRC, XMPP, Hubot, Giphy, Jenkins, GitLab, Trac, BitBucket, Twitter, Redmine, SVN, and RSS / Atom.
The project's server-side code is written in the Go language and is distributed under the MIT license. The web interface and mobile apps are written in JavaScript using React, the desktop client for Linux, Windows, and macOS is built on the Electron platform. MySQL and PostgreSQL can be used as DBMS.
What's new in Mattermost 5.25?
One of the novelties that presented in this new version is the integration with the open platform Jitsi for video conferencing and the provision of access to screen content.
This integration sand it ended thanks to a complement which is preconfigured to use a public Jitsi service (meet.jit.si).
For those interested in integrating the plugin, This can be installed from the add-ons market and then enable the plugin. Optionally, Mattermost can be connected to a self-hosted Jitsi server and configured to use JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication.
To start a new video conference, the "jitsi" command and a special button are implemented in the interface. Video conferencing can be embedded in Mattermost chats as a floating window.
By default, the meet.jit.si server is used for conferences, but you can connect to your own Jitsi server and configure the use of JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication.
The second notable improvement is the update to the Welcomebot plugin To allow personalized messages are displayed to users who connect to Mattermost chats.
Also in this new version introduces the ability to preview welcome messages and support for linking specific messages to individual channels.
Finally if you want to know more about it, you can consult the following link.
How to install Mattermost on Linux?
For those interested in being able to install Mattermost on their system, should go to the official website of the application and in its download section you can find the sections for each supported Linux distribution (for the server).
While for the client the links for the different systems are offered desktop and mobile operating systems. The link is this.
As for the server package, We are offered packages for Ubuntu, Debian or RHEL, as well as an implementation option with Docker, but to obtain the package we must provide our email.
You can follow the following installation guide, it only differs in package installation, but configuration wise it is the same for any distro. The link is this.
On the client's side, for Linux we are currently offered a tar.gz package (for general use in Linux). Although the developers also offer preconfigured packages for Ubuntu and Debian, but at this time these packages have not been formed yet.
wget https://releases.mattermost.com/5.25.0/mattermost-5.25.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
In the case of the tar.gz package, just unzip the package and run the “mattermost-desktop” file inside the folder.
Finally for Arch Linux a package is already compiled for distribution or derivatives thereof, within the AUR repositories.
To obtain it, they only need to have the AUR repository enabled in their pacman.conf file and have yay installed.
The installation is done with the command:
yay mattermost-desktop