Installing the Zulip Development environment ============================================ Using Vagrant ------------- This is the recommended approach, and is tested on OS X 10.10 as well as Ubuntu 14.04. * If your host is OS X, download VirtualBox from and install it. * If your host is Ubuntu 14.04: sudo apt-get install vagrant lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir Once that's done, simply change to your zulip directory and run `vagrant up` in your terminal. That will install the development server inside a Vagrant guest. Once that finishes, you can run the development server as follows: vagrant ssh -- -L9991:localhost:9991 # Now inside the container cd /srv/zulip source /srv/zulip-venv/bin/activate ./tools/run-dev.py You can now visit in your browser. To get shell access to the virtual machine running the server, use `vagrant ssh`. The run-dev.py console output will show any errors your Zulip development server encounters. It runs on top of Django's "manage.py runserver" tool, which will automatically restart the Zulip server whenever you save changes to Python code. By hand ------- Install the following non-Python dependencies: * libffi-dev — needed for some Python extensions * postgresql 9.1 or later — our database (also install development headers) * memcached (and headers) * rabbitmq-server * libldap2-dev * python-dev * redis-server — rate limiting * tsearch-extras — better text search On Debian or Ubuntu systems: sudo apt-get install libffi-dev memcached rabbitmq-server libldap2-dev redis-server postgresql-server-dev-all libmemcached-dev # If on 12.04 or wheezy: sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/283158365/zuliposs/postgresql-9.1-tsearch-extras_0.1.2_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i postgresql-9.1-tsearch-extras_0.1.2_amd64.deb # If on 14.04: sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.3 wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/283158365/zuliposs/postgresql-9.3-tsearch-extras_0.1.2_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i postgresql-9.3-tsearch-extras_0.1.2_amd64.deb # If on 15.04 or jessie: sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.4 wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/283158365/zuliposs/postgresql-9.4-tsearch-extras_0.1_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i postgresql-9.4-tsearch-extras_0.1_amd64.deb # Then, all versions: pip install -r requirements.txt ./scripts/setup/configure-rabbitmq ./tools/postgres-init-db ./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-database To start the development server: ./tools/run-dev.py … and hit http://localhost:9991/. Running the test suite ====================== One-time setup of test databases: ./tools/postgres-init-test-db ./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-test-database Run all tests: ./tools/test-all This runs the linter plus all of our test suites; they can all be run separately (just read `tools/test-all` to see them). You can also run individual tests, e.g.: ./tools/test-backend zerver.test_bugdown.BugdownTest.test_inline_youtube ./tools/test-js-with-casper 10-navigation.js Possible issues =============== The Casper tests are flaky on the Virtualbox environment (probably due to some performance-sensitive races). Until this issue is debugged, you may need to rerun them to get them to pass. When running the test suite, if you get an error like this: sqlalchemy.exc.ProgrammingError: (ProgrammingError) function ts_match_locs_array(unknown, text, tsquery) does not exist LINE 2: ...ECT message_id, flags, subject, rendered_content, ts_match_l... ^ … then you need to install tsearch-extras, described above. Afterwards, re-run the init*-db and the do-destroy-rebuild*-database scripts. Contributing to Zulip ===================== Zulip welcomes all forms of contributions! Before a pull request can be merged, you need to to sign the [Dropbox Contributor License Agreement](https://opensource.dropbox.com/cla/). Also, you should run the tests and lint rules to make sure that they all pass. The development server configuration automatically sets up `tools/lint-all` to run as a pre-commit hook. Zulip also has a [development discussion mailing list](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/zulip-devel) Running Zulip in production =========================== This is documented in https://zulip.org/server.html and README.prod.md.