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
  <http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.30/VirtualBox-4.3.30-101610-OSX.dmg>
  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 --interface=''

You can now visit <http://localhost:9991/> in your browser.  To get
shell access to the virtual machine running the server, use `vagrant ssh`.

(A small note on tools/run-dev.py: the --interface='' option will make
the development server listen on all network interfaces.  While this
is correct for the Vagrant guest sitting behind a NAT, you probably
don't want to use that option when using run-dev.py in other environments).

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/).

Please run the tests (tools/test-all) before submitting your pull
request.

Zulip has a growing collection of developer documentation including
detailed documentation on coding style available on [Read The
Docs](https://zulip.readthedocs.org/).

Zulip also has a [development discussion mailing list](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/zulip-devel)

Feel free to send any questions or suggestions of areas where you'd
love to see more documentation to the list!

We recommend sending proposals for large features or refactorings to
the zulip-devel list for discussion and advice before getting too deep
into implementation.

Please report any security issues you discover to support@zulip.com.

Running Zulip in production
===========================

This is documented in https://zulip.org/server.html and README.prod.md.