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Caprover UniLink Production deployment guide

Caprover Overview​

Caprover is an extremely easy to use application server management tool. It is blazing fast and uses Docker under the hood. UniLink has been made available as a one-click app in Caprover, and the deployment process is straightforward.

Note: This is a community contributed installation setup. This will only have community support for any issues in future.

1. Install Caprover on your VM​

Finish your Caprover installation by referring to Getting started guide.

UniLink is available in the one-click apps option in Caprover. Search for UniLink in the list of one-click apps. Replace the default version with the latest version of chatwoot. Use appropriate values for the Postgres and Redis passwords and click install. It should only take a few minutes.

3. Finish the setup​

Head over to the web service in the Caprover applications and enable Websocket Support in the HTTP settings to true. You could also enable https for the application.

caprover-enable-websocket

4. Configure environment variables​

Caprover will take care of Postgres and Redis installation, along with the app and worker servers. We would advise you to replace the Database/Redis services with managed/standalone servers once you start scaling.

Also, ensure to set the appropriate environment variables for email, Object Store service etc. using our Environment variables guide

NOTE: UniLink requires websocket support. Do enable it from chatwoot-web settings page in Caprover.

To update your chatwoot installation to the latest version in Caprover, run the following command in the deployment tab for web and worker in method 5: deploy captain-definition. Make sure to replace [DESIRED VERSION HERE] with the current latest stable version. Check here and here for possible version numbers first.

web​

{
  "schemaVersion": 2,
  "dockerfileLines": [
    "FROM chatwoot/chatwoot:[DESIRED VERSION HERE]",
    "RUN chmod +x docker/entrypoints/rails.sh",
    "ENTRYPOINT [\"docker/entrypoints/rails.sh\"]",
    "CMD bundle exec rake db:chatwoot_prepare; bundle exec rails s -b 0.0.0.0 -p 3000"
  ]
}

worker​

{
  "schemaVersion": 2,
  "dockerfileLines": [
    "FROM chatwoot/chatwoot:[DESIRED VERSION HERE]",
    "RUN chmod +x docker/entrypoints/rails.sh",
    "ENTRYPOINT [\"docker/entrypoints/rails.sh\"]",
    "CMD bundle exec sidekiq -C config/sidekiq.yml"
  ]
}

Accessing Rails Console​

Login to the server where you have caprover installed and execute the following commands.

# access the shell inside the container
docker exec -it $(docker ps --filter name=srv-captain--chatwoot-web -q) /bin/sh
# start rails console
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails c

Common Errors​

API requests failing with "You need to sign in or sign up before continuing."​

Nginx by default strip of headers with _ . Head over to the Nginx configuration option in caprover under the UniLink web and add the following directive.

Access the Caprover web dashboard > Apps > Apps Edit > Edit Default Nginx Configurations. Refer https://caprover.com/docs/nginx-customization.html for more details.

  # Nginx strips out underscore in headers by default
  # UniLink relies on underscore in headers for API
  # Make sure that the config is set to on.
  underscores_in_headers on;

Please setup a cloud storage like s3 or gcs bucket or any s3 api compatible service as the active storage service. Caprover installation needs this for storage persistance. Refer the storage guide.

Further references​