Customize the Mattermost Web App

Customizations to the Mattermost Web App can be performed in cases where you need to customize branding, alter localization strings, or fulfill security requirements that are not immediately offered out-of-the-box.

Customization steps 

With that in mind, customizing and deploying your Mattermost Web App can be done in a few steps:

1. Fork the mattermost-webapp repository and then clone your fork in your local environment.

git clone https://github.com/<yourgithubusername>/mattermost-webapp

2. Create a separate branch for your customized version, as it’s not recommended to perform them in the master branch (more details about that in the next section regarding rebasing).

git checkout -b custom_branch

3. Perform customization tasks by replacing image assets, changing strings, altering the UI, and whatever else may be necessary. Be mindful not to violate any of the guidelines on trademark use during this process.

4. Once customization has been completed, build the files that will be used in your deployment.

make build

5. Create a tarball or zip the files within the dist directory.

cd dist
tar -cvf dist.tar *

6. In a Mattermost deployment, remove all files seen in the client directory (assuming Mattermost was deployed in the $HOME directory).

cd ~/mattermost/client && rm -rf *

7. Transfer compressed dist files inside Mattermost’s client directory, and decompress it.

tar -xvf dist.tar

Rebasing to latest version 

Challenges arise when creating a separate custom branch from an active open-source project like mattermost-webapp. As the project gets new commits and pull requests on a daily basis, your custom webapp can quickly become outdated.

To deal with that, you’ll need to leverage Git’s interactive rebasing functionality in the following way:

1. Add an upstream with the original mattermost-webapp repository.

git remote add upstream https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp.git

2. Update master branch to latest upstream commit.

git checkout master
git pull upstream master

3. Perform interactive rebase.

git checkout custom_branch  
git rebase -i master

Use git rebase --continue after resolving any conflicts that arise during rebase process

4. Push new version back to remote (Note: Rebasing requires that you override previous remote version with a force push. Be sure you’ve tested that your rebase was successful before completing this last command).

git push -f origin custom_branch