Introduction

Grapevine is a Matrix homeserver that was originally forked from Conduit 0.7.0.

Chat with us

Currently, the Matrix room at #grapevine:computer.surgery serves multiple purposes:

• General discussion about the project, such as answering questions about it
• Reporting issues with Grapevine, if getting GitLab access is too much trouble for you
• Providing support to users running Grapevine
• Discussing the development of Grapevine

If you'd like to engage in or observe any of those things, please join!

Can I use it?

Theoretically yes, but it's not ready for general use yet, because:

• There aren't any releases.
• There isn't very much user-facing documentation.
• There have been several additions and breaking changes to the configuration file format that haven't been documented in detail. This means you'll need to read the source code to figure out what all the options are and what they do.

If these issues don't scare you away, go for it! (And if you use NixOS, here's an example.)

Expectations management

This project is run and maintained entirely by volunteers who are doing their best. Additionally, due to our goals, the development of new features may be slower than alternatives. We find this to be an acceptable tradeoff considering the importance of the reliability of a project like this.

Goals

Our goal is to provide a robust and reliable Matrix homeserver implementation. In order to accomplish this, we aim to do the following:

• Optimize for maintainability
• Implement automated testing to ensure correctness
• Improve instrumentation to provide real-world data to aid decision-making

Non-goals

We also have some things we specifically want to avoid as we feel they inhibit our ability to accomplish our goals:

• macOS or Windows support
  • These operating systems are very uncommon in the hobbyist server space, and we feel our effort is better spent elsewhere.
• Docker support
  • Docker tends to generate a high volume of support requests that are solely due to Docker itself or how users are using Docker. In attempt to mitigate this, we will not provide first-party Docker images. Instead, we'd recommend avoiding Docker and either using our pre-built statically-linked binaries or building from source. However, if your deployment mechanism requires Docker, it should be straightforward to build your own Docker image.
• Configuration via environment variables
  • Environment variables restrict the options for structuring configuration and support for them would increase the maintenance burden. If your deployment mechanism requires this, consider using an external tool like envsubst.
• Configuration compatibility with Conduit
  • To provide a secure and ergonomic configuration experience, breaking changes are required. However, we do intend to provide a migration tool to ease migration; this feature is tracked here.
• Perfect database compatibility with Conduit
  • The current database compatibility status can be tracked here. In the long run, it's inevitable that changes will be made to Conduit that we won't want to pull in, or that we need to make changes that Conduit won't want to pull in.

Project management

The project's current maintainers¹ are:

We would like to expand this list in the future as social trust is built and technical competence is demonstrated by other contributors.

We require at least 1 approving code review from a maintainer² before changes can be merged. This number may increase in the future as the list of maintainers grows.