Open source Slack-alternative taking off: new open source installers for Cloud Foundry, Heroku, GitLab & more

Since Mattermost 1.0 released as an open source Slack-alternative in October, the community has grown rapidly.

When teams deploy, extend, and customize Mattermost, work is often shared back, making it easier and more compelling for others to do the same.

New Installers

The base layer of contributions is all about deployment, with open source installers for Cloud Foundry, Heroku, and GitLab omnibus bringing Mattermost to over a dozen infrastructure platforms, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Compute, and OpenStack. 

Cloud Foundry BOSH release for Mattermost deploys the system on Azure, AWS, vSphere, GCE and OpenStack

Beyond installers, community members are creating install guides and offering peer-to-peer help and troubleshooting across our forums.

New Integrations

The next layer is about integrations extending Mattermost through its Slack-compatible interfaces. Hubot, an open source virtual assistant, now offers Mattermost users everything from image search, to maps, to automated language translation through a text-based interface. Projects out of France and Japan provide users with native clients on Windows, Mac and Linux machines, and our community is connecting Mattermost with everything from IRC to Jenkins to Disqus through open source integrations, all available from the community applications page.

Hubot lets Mattermost users interact with a wide array of 3rd party automation and tools

New Core Features

Finally, there are contributions to the internals of Mattermost itself. In each monthly release, dozens of engineers from around the world are sharing back features they’ve created for the users they care about–from beautifully rendering mathematical calculations in Latex, to playing cat videos from Vine links, to choosing theme colors for how syntax in different programming languages is highlighted when quoted.

A virtuous cycle is spinning up. The more the product improves, the more users it attracts, which attracts more contributors, who improve the product daily.

So a huge “THANK YOU!” you to all our contributors and users! You have made all the difference.

We look forward to your continued feedback, questions, comments and ideas. Please join us on our forum to discuss what’s next.

PS: If you’re new to Mattermost check out its features and install guides to get started.