Element as a Genestack App

Last week I published a blog post on how I run Element chat services within a Genestack cluster. I walked through the install process and how I created files within the Genestack deployment structure to deploy the Element Server Suite as an application within a Genestack cluster. This week I'm back with another blog post to reveal a new repository which will automate the process of deploying the Element Server Suit within the same Genestack environment.

The process is simple:

1. Clone the repository
2. Run the install script
3. Profit

Getting the code is straight forward. Go to https://github.com/cloudnull/genestack-apps-element and download it

git clone https://github.com/cloudnull/genestack-apps-element /opt/genestack-apps-element

Once you have the code, run the install script.

/opt/genestack-apps-element/install.sh

The script will prompt you for a domain name, if the environment variable GATEWAY_DOMAIN is undefined.

This step is important. The setup will create a new subdomain using whatever you enter into this field, and the expectation is that the domain will be routable from within the environment.

The script will run, place all the needed files into the right locations, deploy the Element Server Suit, and setup the Gateway API to serve the workloads. Upon completion you will see a terminal notification telling you how to access the deployment and continue with the setup.

FIN

I started out with the desire to have a better chat experience when interacting with IRC, and Element got me there. The element chat solution is elegant with full featured mobile and web experiences; this is 100% of what I was looking for. By integrating the deployment into Genestack, I can host this workload along side my Kubernetes and OpenStack systems running tenant workloads and I have full access to the Genestack deployment engine giving me the ability to Kustomize my deployments as I see fit.

My hope is that this example is helpful and if you use it I'd love your thoughts.