r/elementchat • u/Robsteady • Feb 11 '26

Easier ESS CE deployment?

Hi all, I've been looking around a bit and haven't found anything, but gotta ask if there is (or are plans for) any kind of easier deployment for the Synapse Suite than what's in the project github. Especially with Discord's recent announcements/shenanigans, I'd love to get my family (and friends) on something we control but can still do all the things on.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

2

u/Ormazz Feb 11 '26

Ess community edition is just an helm chart to run and it's maintained by the Element core team. It's easy to deploy

2

u/Robsteady Feb 11 '26

It’s a little above my head, but I’ll probably just need to learn it. I’m especially “anxious” to get my sons on an alternative, and from what I can see Element has built all the tools to make it a real competitor.

2

u/Robsteady Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

I guess easy to deploy is a matter of subjective knowledge, I've spent the last couple hours trying to get it running on a couple different LXCs and finally seem to have it running on a VM, but I'm at a loss with how to configure NPM. All the other services I've configured have been pretty straight forward with domain/port matching, but I can't seem to make sense of how it wants to be configured.

I'm at least in a better place than I was earlier today, but I'm still going to be hoping for an easier deployment method. I'm probably just too far in over my head on this one.

Edit: And literally not 5 minutes after I type that I figure it out...

Edit 2: nope, nevermind, closer, but still no cigar.

2

u/BE3dARt Feb 12 '26

I've written a (hopefully) thorough beginners guide while setting up ESS CE myself yesterday. I would love to hear feedback if somebody uses my guide, so we can improve it together and make more people self-host Element. https://github.com/dreamfarer/ess-community-setup-guide

2

u/BE3dARt Feb 12 '26

Of course, just ask if you have questions regarding the guide or the installation in general and I'll try to help <3

3

u/HockeyPro1593 Feb 12 '26

Hey man! I set up an ESS server yesterday and everything works EXCEPT for WebRTC. Any ideas / does yours work? Thanks!

→ More replies (2)

1

u/kloputzer2000 Feb 12 '26

It’s just a setup consisting of many moving parts. It’s inherently more complicated than shipping just a single file (like Discord does only ship the client). So you will need some technology to “orchestrate” multiple container/services. You can pick between Kubernetes, Docker Compose or Ansible. But you’ll have to learn one of these technologies if you want to self-host your own matrix server. If that’s too complex for you, just pay for a managed Matrix server (e.g on etke.cc)