running-in-a-sub-folder.md

Running in a sub folder with Apache

{% hint style="warning" %} NOTE: Running in a subfolder has been officially deprecated. It will no longer be supported in the upcoming 4.0 release. See our April 2020 announcement {% endhint %}

If you want to run your server in a subfolder like https://your.domain.com/chat/ you have to set up a reverse proxy. See Run Rocket.Chat behind a SSL Reverse Proxy

If you are using apache you will have to tweak the configuration. First you have to put the Rewrite/Proxy into a Location-tag. For example, if you want to provide the service under the "chat" subfolder, your config should look like this:

<Location /chat>
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} =websocket [NC]
    RewriteRule /var/www/(.*)           ws://localhost:3000/$1 [P,L]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} !=websocket [NC]
    RewriteRule /var/www/(.*)           http://localhost:3000/$1 [P,L]

    ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:3000
</Location>

The main difference to the standard reverse proxy configuration is an additional RewriteRule, /var/www in the example, which must be changed to your DocumentRoot (if it's not already your DocumentRoot).

If you pass the whole path, including the DocumentRoot to the Rocket.Chat server, you'll get a 404 response and an Unknown path server error.

In our example, we used the /chat as a subfolder (it's parsed out of the ROOT_URL provided) but the Rocket.Chat server gets a request for /var/www/chat, detects a mismatch and returns the above-mentioned error.

Additional notes:

• Using the RewriteBase Directive won't work.
• The ProxyPassReverse can be used inside a Location tag and the first parameter must be omitted in this case.
• You don't need to configure a Location for the root folder / when using Rocket.Chat in a subfolder (it's likely configured for other stuff already in this case).
• For those curious about the details: the mentioned path-handling is in webapp.js, search for Unknown path.
• Please make sure that the modules rewrite, proxy_http and proxy_wstunnel are enabled in the apache configuration. Otherwise, the WebSocket calls will return a 500 http response.

Running the application

To run in a subfolder you should pass the environment variable ROOT_URL to the process. For example:

ROOT_URL=https://your.domain.com/chat/ node main.js

If you followed the manual installation guide, you may already have configured (and persisted) this environment variable - in this case, you can ignore this advice.