What are the exact drawbacks of the preview version?

I recently discovered Mattermost and it looks like it ticks all the marks in what I need. This is a home environment with very low activity (compared to a industrial setup).

I tried the “preview” docker version and the docs tell me that

This configuration should not be used in production, as it’s using a known password string and contains other non-production configuration settings, and it does not support upgrade.

What are the exact drawbacks of using this version?

  • is the known password changeable or does it seriously affects the security (one user, closed network, exposition of the URL for webhooks, possibly with filtering)
  • are the non-production configuration settings relevant for such case (I do not need more performance than what i saw in the tests)
  • the last one is more worrisome: inability to upgrade. Does this mean that the image is such that the data is local and would not survive an image change (the answer is yes as there are no mounted volumes). Is it possible to mount a volume to persist the data?

I would like to ideally avoid using the production version which is really comprehensive (docker-wise)

Hi @WoJ, a response from a community member:

Can you help describe which properties of the production image you dislike? Reading your message they’d say: one major disadvantage of using/configuring the preview image as production image (which is what you attempt) requires advanced knowledge about various Mattermost topics. On top of that, it’s unsupported.

It is not really that I “dislike” and more that there are several images to run in parallel to handle one home instance.

This said - I installed the production version, it works great so fine. It would, maybe, be useful to have the intermediate case where data in the non-production version would be exposed for persistence between restarts which would probably make it a very suitable solution for smaller scale deployments.

Other than that I take the opportunity for a big thanks for the product!

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