Familiarise yourself with the Important Security Notes before starting, they apply to all installation methods.
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.
- Download the latest version from https://github.com/element-hq/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.element.io/element-release-key.asc.
Element Web is now also available as a Debian package for Debian and Ubuntu based systems.
sudo apt install -y wget apt-transport-https
sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/element-io-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.element.io/debian/element-io-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/element-io-archive-keyring.gpg] https://packages.element.io/debian/ default main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/element-io.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install element-web
Configure the app by modifying /etc/element-web/config.json
. See the configuration docs for details.
Then point your chosen web server (e.g. Caddy, Nginx, Apache, etc) at the /usr/share/element-web
webroot.
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/element-hq/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 JS_SDK_REPO="https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk.git" \
--build-arg JS_SDK_BRANCH="develop" \
.
The provided element-web docker image can also be run from within a Kubernetes cluster. See the Kubernetes example for more details.