- Makes "Deployment options" easier to navigate by splitting the
"Reverse proxies" and "System configuration" sections out into
dedicated pages.
Fixes#28928.
As a consequence:
• Bump minimum supported Python version to 3.8.
• Move Vagrant environment to Ubuntu 20.04, which has Python 3.8.
• Move CI frontend tests to Ubuntu 20.04.
• Move production build test to Ubuntu 20.04.
• Move 3.4 upgrade test to Ubuntu 20.04.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
Ubuntu 22.04 pushed a post-feature-freeze update to Python 3.10,
breaking virtual environments in a Debian patch
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python3.10/+bug/1962791).
Also, our antique version of Tornado doesn’t work in 3.10, and we’ll
need to do some work to upgrade that.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
This uses the myst_heading_anchors option to automatically generate
header anchors and make Sphinx aware of them. See
https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/syntax/optional.html#auto-generated-header-anchors.
Note: to be compatible with GitHub, MyST-Parser uses a slightly
different convention for .md fragment links than .html fragment links
when punctuation is involved. This does not affect the generated
fragment links in the HTML output.
Fixes#13264.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
We previously had a convention of redundantly including the directory
in relative links to reduce mistakes when moving content from one file
to another. However, these days we have a broken link checker in
test-documentation, and after #21237, MyST-Parser will check relative
links (including fragments) when you run build-docs.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
The Erlang `epmd` daemon listens on port 4369, and provides
information (without authentication) about which Erlang processes are
listening on what ports. This information is not itself a
vulnerability, but may provide information for remote attackers about
what local Erlang services (such as `rabbitmq-server`) are running,
and where.
`epmd` supports an `ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS` environment variable to limit
which interfaces it binds on. While this environment variable is set
in `/etc/default/rabbitmq-server`, Zulip unfortunately attempts to
start `epmd` using an explicit `exec` block, which ignores those
settings.
Regardless, this lack of `ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS` variable only controls
`epmd`'s startup upon first installation. Upon reboot, there are two
ways in which `epmd` might be started, neither of which respect
`ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS`:
- On Focal, an `epmd` service exists and is activated, which uses
systemd's configuration to choose which interfaces to bind on, and
thus `ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS` is irrelevant.
- On Bionic (and Focal, due to a broken dependency from
`rabbitmq-server` to `epmd@` instead of `epmd`, which may lead to
the explicit `epmd` service losing a race), `epmd` is started by
`rabbitmq-server` when it does not detect a running instance.
Unfortunately, only `/etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server` would respects
`/etc/default/rabbitmq-server` -- and it defers the actual startup
to using systemd, which does not pass the environment variable
down. Thus, `ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS` is also irrelevant here.
We unfortunately cannot limit `epmd` to only listening on localhost,
due to a number of overlapping bugs and limitations:
- Manually starting `epmd` with `-address 127.0.0.1` silently fails
to start on hosts with IPv6 disabled, due to an Erlang bug ([1],
[2]).
- The dependencies of the systemd `rabbitmq-server` service can be
fixed to include the `epmd` service, and systemd can be made to
bind to `127.0.0.1:4369` and pass that socket to `epmd`, bypassing
the above bug. However, the startup of this service is not
guaranteed, because it races with other sources of `epmd` (see
below).
- Any process that runs `rabbitmqctl` results in `epmd` being started
if one is not currently running; these instances do not respect any
environment variables as to which addresses to bind on. This is
also triggered by `service rabbitmq-server status`, as well as
various Zulip cron jobs which inspect the rabbitmq queues. As
such, it is difficult-to-impossible to ensure that some other
`epmd` process will not win the race and open the port on all
interfaces.
Since the only known exposure from leaving port 4369 open is
information that rabbitmq is running on the host, and the complexity
of adjusting this to only bind on localhost is high, we remove the
setting which does not address the problem, and document that the port
is left open, and should be protected via system-level or
network-level firewalls.
[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/erlang/+bug/1374109
[2]: https://github.com/erlang/otp/issues/4820
As a consequence:
• Bump minimum supported Python version to 3.7.
• Move Vagrant environment to Debian 10, which has Python 3.7.
• Move CI frontend tests to Debian 10.
• Move production build test to Debian 10.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <anders@zulip.com>
We recently changed /developer-community to /development-community.
Now that this change is in production, we can also migrate the
external links in our ReadTheDocs documentation.
PostgreSQL 11 and below used a configuration file names
`recovery.conf` to manage replicas and standbys; support for this was
removed in PostgreSQL 12[1], and the configuration parameters were
moved into the main `postgresql.conf`.
Add `zulip.conf` settings for the primary server hostname and
replication username, so that the complete `postgresql.conf`
configuration on PostgreSQL 14 can continue to be managed, even when
replication is enabled. For consistency, also begin writing out the
`recovery.conf` for PostgreSQL 11 and below.
In PostgreSQL 12 configuration and later, the `wal_level =
hot_standby` setting is removed, as `hot_standby` is equivalent to
`replica`, which is the default value[2]. Similarly, the
`hot_standby = on` setting is also the default[3].
Documentation is added for these features, and the commentary on the
"Export and Import" page referencing files under `puppet/zulip_ops/`
is removed, as those files no longer have any replication-specific
configuration.
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/recovery-config.html
[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/runtime-config-wal.html#GUC-WAL-LEVEL
[3]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-HOT-STANDBY
This is an additional security hardening step, to make Zulip default
to preventing SSRF attacks. The overhead of running Smokescreen is
minimal, and there is no reason to force deployments to take
additional steps in order to secure themselves against SSRF attacks.
Deployments which already have a different external proxy configured
will not gain a local Smokescreen installation, and running without
Smokescreen is supported by explicitly unsetting the `host` or `port`
values in `/etc/zulip/zulip.conf`.
This helps increase the probability that folks read the guidelines for how the
chat.zulip.org community works and what streams to use before arriving there.
Fixes#19827.
The support for bullseye was added in #17951
but it was not documented as bullseye was
frozen and did not have proper configuration
files, hence wasn't documented.
Since now bullseye is released as a stable
version, it's support can be documented.
This document is mainly an answer to a set of questions other
developers have been asking about Zulip's architecture and scalability
design. It's intended for developers working on Zulip, to help with
thinking about where to prioritize further efforts to optimize
scalability.
These are respected by `urllib`, and thus also `requests`. We set
`HTTP_proxy`, not `HTTP_PROXY`, because the latter is ignored in
situations which might be running under CGI -- in such cases it may be
coming from the `Proxy:` header in the request.
Now that we have production support for Ubuntu Focal, we update the
documentation to state our support for it.
(We also drop deprecated Xenial and Stretch from supported platforms).
We're migrating to using the cleaner zulip.com domain, which involves
changing all of our links from ReadTheDocs and other places to point
to the cleaner URL.
Also make sure our documentation for upgrading is reasonable for
Stretch => Buster.
Our reasoning for deprecating support for these releases is as follows:
* Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial reached desktop EOL last year; and will reach
EOL on the server in about a year.
* Debian Stretch will each EOL in 2020 (the precise date is unclear in
Debian's documentation, but based on past precedent it's in the next
few months, perhaps July 2020).
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases#Production_Releases
* Both Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian Stretch use Python 3.5 as the system
Python, which will reach EOL in September 2020 (and we're already
seeing various third-party dependencies that we use drop support for
them).
* While there is LTS support for these older releases, it's not clear it's
going to be worth the added engineering effort for us to maintain EOL
releases of the base OSes that we support.
* We (now) have clear upgrade instructions for moving to Debian Buster
and Ubuntu 18.04.
This text is very old and hadn't been edited in a long time, in large
part because it was buried within old docs. This change cleans it up
to give accurate and better-organized information.
* Moves "Management commands" to a top-level section.
* Moves "Scalability" as a subsection at the bottom of "Requirements".
* Moves "Monitoring" as a subsections at the bottom of "Troubleshooting".
* Replaces "API and your Zulip URL" with a link to REST API docs. This
documentation text has been irrelevant for some time.
* Removes maintain-secure-upgrade from the TOC but the file remains to
avoid breaking old links from release blog posts and emails.
Alex Vandiver
Anders Kaseorg
Anders Kaseorg
David Rosa
rht
Raghav Luthra
Eeshan Garg
Ankur
Tim Abbott
Gaurav Pandey
Mateusz Mandera
Vishnu Ks
Tim Abbott