Installing Element Web

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.

Release tarball

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 to config.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.

Debian package

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.

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 --rm -p 127.0.0.1:80:80 vectorim/element-web

A server can also be made available to clients outside the local host by omitting the explicit local address as described in docker run documentation:

docker run --rm -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 --rm -p 127.0.0.1:80:80 -v /etc/element-web/config.json:/app/config.json vectorim/element-web

The Docker image is configured to run as an unprivileged (non-root) user by default. This should be fine on modern Docker runtimes, but binding to port 80 on other runtimes may require root privileges. To resolve this, either run the image as root (docker run --user 0) or, better, change the port that nginx listens on via the ELEMENT_WEB_PORT environment variable.

The behaviour of the docker image can be customised via the following environment variables:

ELEMENT_WEB_PORT

The port to listen on (within the docker container) for HTTP traffic. Defaults to 80.

Building the docker image

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" \
    .

Kubernetes

The provided element-web docker image can also be run from within a Kubernetes cluster. See the Kubernetes example for more details.

Element Web & Desktop