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Element
Element (formerly known as Vector and Riot) is a Matrix web client built using the Matrix React SDK.
Supported Environments
Element has several tiers of support for different environments:
- Supported
- Definition: Issues actively triaged, regressions block the release
- Last 2 major versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on desktop OSes
- Latest release of official Element Desktop app on desktop OSes
- Desktop OSes means macOS, Windows, and Linux versions for desktop devices that are actively supported by the OS vendor and receive security updates
- Experimental
- Definition: Issues accepted, regressions do not block the release
- Element as an installed PWA via current stable version of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari
- Mobile web for current stable version of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on Android, iOS, and iPadOS
- Not supported
- Definition: Issues only affecting unsupported environments are closed
- Everything else
For accessing Element on an Android or iOS device, we currently recommend the native apps element-android and element-ios.
Getting Started
The easiest way to test Element is to just use the hosted copy at https://app.element.io.
The develop
branch is continuously deployed to https://develop.element.io
for those who like living dangerously.
To host your own copy of Element, the quickest bet is to use a pre-built released version of Element:
- Download the latest version from https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/releases
- Untar the tarball on your web server
- Move (or symlink) the
element-x.x.x
directory to an appropriate name - Configure the correct caching headers in your webserver (see below)
- Configure the app by copying
config.sample.json
toconfig.json
and modifying it. See the configuration docs for details. - Enter the URL into your browser and log into Element!
Releases are signed using gpg and the OpenPGP standard, and can be checked against the public key located at https://packages.riot.im/element-release-key.asc.
Note that for the security of your chats will need to serve Element over HTTPS. Major browsers also do not allow you to use VoIP/video chats over HTTP, as WebRTC is only usable over HTTPS. There are some exceptions like when using localhost, which is considered a secure context and thus allowed.
To install Element as a desktop application, see Running as a desktop app below.
Important Security Notes
Separate domains
We do not recommend running Element 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 Element to load and render malicious user generated content from a Matrix API which then had trusted access to Element (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/element-web/issues/1977 for more details.
Configuration best practices
Unless you have special requirements, you will want to add the following to your web server configuration when hosting Element Web:
- The
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
header, to prevent Element Web from being framed and protect from clickjacking. - The
frame-ancestors 'none'
directive to yourContent-Security-Policy
header, as the modern replacement forX-Frame-Options
(though both should be included since not all browsers support it yet, see this). - The
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
header, to disable MIME sniffing. - The
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block;
header, for basic XSS protection in legacy browsers.
If you are using nginx, this would look something like the following:
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
add_header Content-Security-Policy "frame-ancestors 'none'";
Note: In case you are already setting a Content-Security-Policy
header
elsewhere, you should modify it to include the frame-ancestors
directive
instead of adding that last line.
Building From Source
Element is a modular webapp built with modern ES6 and uses a Node.js build system. Ensure you have the latest LTS version of Node.js installed.
Using yarn
instead of npm
is recommended. Please see the Yarn install
guide if you do not have it already.
- Install or update
node.js
so that yournode
is at least the current recommended LTS. - Install
yarn
if not present already. - Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/vector-im/element-web.git
. - Switch to the element-web directory:
cd element-web
. - Install the prerequisites:
yarn install
.- If you're using the
develop
branch, then it is recommended to set up a proper development environment (see Setting up a dev environment below). Alternatively, you can use https://develop.element.io - the continuous integration release of the develop branch.
- If you're using the
- Configure the app by copying
config.sample.json
toconfig.json
and modifying it. See the configuration docs for details. yarn 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 yarn dist
is not supported on Windows, so Windows users can run yarn build
,
which will build all the necessary files into the webapp
directory. The version of Element
will not appear in Settings without using the dist script. You can then mount the
webapp
directory on your web server to actually serve up the app, which is
entirely static content.
Running as a Desktop app
Element can also be run as a desktop app, wrapped in Electron. You can download a pre-built version from https://element.io/get-started or, if you prefer, build it yourself.
To build it yourself, follow the instructions at https://github.com/vector-im/element-desktop.
Many thanks to @aviraldg for the initial work on the Electron integration.
Other options for running as a desktop app:
- @asdf:matrix.org points out that you can use nativefier and it just works(tm)
yarn global add nativefier
nativefier https://app.element.io/
The configuration docs show how to override the desktop app's default settings if desired.
Running from Docker
The Docker image can be used to serve element-web as a web server. The easiest way to use it is to use the prebuilt image:
docker run -p 80:80 vectorim/element-web
To supply your own custom config.json
, map a volume to /app/config.json
. For example,
if your custom config was located at /etc/element-web/config.json
then your Docker command
would be:
docker run -p 80:80 -v /etc/element-web/config.json:/app/config.json vectorim/element-web
To build the image yourself:
git clone https://github.com/vector-im/element-web.git element-web
cd element-web
git checkout master
docker build .
If you're building a custom branch, or want to use the develop branch, check out the appropriate element-web branch and then run:
docker build -t \
--build-arg USE_CUSTOM_SDKS=true \
--build-arg REACT_SDK_REPO="https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk.git" \
--build-arg REACT_SDK_BRANCH="develop" \
--build-arg JS_SDK_REPO="https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk.git" \
--build-arg JS_SDK_BRANCH="develop" \
.
Running in Kubernetes
The provided element-web docker image can also be run from within a Kubernetes cluster. See the Kubernetes example for more details.
config.json
Element supports a variety of settings to configure default servers, behaviour, themes, etc. See the configuration docs for more details.
Labs Features
Some features of Element may be enabled by flags in the Labs
section of the settings.
Some of these features are described in labs.md.
Caching requirements
Element requires the following URLs not to be cached, when/if you are serving Element from your own webserver:
/config.*.json
/i18n
/home
/sites
/index.html
We also recommend that you force browsers to re-validate any cached copy of Element on page load by configuring your
webserver to return Cache-Control: no-cache
for /
. This ensures the browser will fetch a new version of Element on
the next page load after it's been deployed. Note that this is already configured for you in the nginx config of our
Dockerfile.
Development
Before attempting to develop on Element you must read the developer guide
for matrix-react-sdk
, which
also defines the design, architecture and style for Element too.
Before starting work on a feature, it's best to ensure your plan aligns well with our vision for Element. Please chat with the team in #element-dev:matrix.org before you start so we can ensure it's something we'd be willing to merge.
You should also familiarise yourself with the "Here be Dragons" guide to the tame & not-so-tame dragons (gotchas) which exist in the codebase.
The idea of Element 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.
Please note that Element 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 Element itself.
CSS hot-reload is available as an opt-in development feature. You can enable it
by defining a CSS_HOT_RELOAD
environment variable, in a .env
file in the root
of the repository. See .env.example
for documentation and an example.
Setting up a dev environment
Much of the functionality in Element 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
:
git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk.git
pushd matrix-js-sdk
yarn link
yarn install
popd
Then similarly with matrix-react-sdk
:
git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk.git
pushd matrix-react-sdk
yarn link
yarn link matrix-js-sdk
yarn install
popd
Clone the repo and switch to the element-web
directory:
git clone https://github.com/vector-im/element-web.git
cd element-web
Configure the app by copying config.sample.json
to config.json
and
modifying it. See the configuration docs for details.
Finally, build and start Element itself:
yarn link matrix-js-sdk
yarn link matrix-react-sdk
yarn install
yarn start
Wait a few seconds for the initial build to finish; you should see something like:
[element-js] <s> [webpack.Progress] 100%
[element-js]
[element-js] ℹ 「wdm」: 1840 modules
[element-js] ℹ 「wdm」: Compiled successfully.
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.
Open http://127.0.0.1:8080/ in your browser to see your newly built Element.
Note: The build script uses inotify by default on Linux to monitor directories
for changes. If the inotify limits are too low your build will fail silently or with
Error: EMFILE: too many open files
. To avoid these issues, we recommend a watch limit
of at least 128M
and instance limit around 512
.
You may be interested in issues #15750 and #15774 for further details.
To set a new inotify watch and instance limit, execute:
sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=131072
sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances=512
sudo sysctl -p
If you wish, you can make the new limits permanent, by executing:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=131072 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
echo fs.inotify.max_user_instances=512 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p
When you make changes to matrix-react-sdk
or matrix-js-sdk
they should be
automatically picked up by webpack and built.
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 Element.
Running the tests
There are a number of application-level tests in the tests
directory; these
are designed to run with Jest and JSDOM. To run them
yarn test
End-to-End tests
See matrix-react-sdk for how to run the end-to-end tests.
Translations
To add a new translation, head to the translating doc.
For a developer guide, see the translating dev doc.
Triaging issues
Issues are triaged by community members and the Web App Team, following the triage process.
We use issue labels to sort all incoming issues.