configuring-playbook-client-cinny.md

Setting up Cinny (optional)

This playbook can install the Cinny Matrix web client for you.

Cinny is a web client focusing primarily on simple, elegant and secure interface. It can be installed alongside or instead of Element Web.

💡 Note: the latest version of Cinny is also available on the web, hosted by 3rd parties. If you trust giving your credentials to the following 3rd party Single Page Applications, you can consider using it from there and avoiding the (small) overhead of self-hosting:

• app.cinny.in, hosted by the Cinny developers

Adjusting the playbook configuration

To enable Cinny, add the following configuration to your inventory/host_vars/matrix.example.com/vars.yml file:

matrix_client_cinny_enabled: true

Adjusting the Cinny URL

By default, this playbook installs Cinny on the cinny. subdomain (cinny.example.com) and requires you to adjust your DNS records.

By tweaking the matrix_client_cinny_hostname variable, you can easily make the service available at a different hostname than the default one.

While a matrix_client_cinny_path_prefix variable exists for tweaking the path-prefix, it's not supported anymore, because Cinny requires an application rebuild (with a tweaked build config) to be functional under a custom path.

Example additional configuration for your inventory/host_vars/matrix.example.com/vars.yml file:

# Switch to a different domain (`app.example.com`) than the default one (`cinny.example.com`)
matrix_client_cinny_hostname: "app.{{ matrix_domain }}"

Adjusting DNS records

Once you've decided on the domain, you may need to adjust your DNS records to point the Cinny domain to the Matrix server.

By default, you will need to create a CNAME record for cinny. See Configuring DNS for details about DNS changes.

If you've adjusted matrix_client_cinny_hostname, you will need to adjust your DNS configuration accordingly.

Installing

After configuring the playbook and adjusting your DNS records, run the playbook with playbook tags as below:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all,start

The shortcut commands with the just program are also available: just install-all or just setup-all

just install-all is useful for maintaining your setup quickly (2x-5x faster than just setup-all) when its components remain unchanged. If you adjust your vars.yml to remove other components, you'd need to run just setup-all, or these components will still remain installed. Note these shortcuts run the ensure-matrix-users-created tag too.