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Installing the Zulip Development environment
You will need a machine with at least 2GB of RAM available (see https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/32 for a plan for how to dramatically reduce this requirement).
Start by cloning this repository: git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git
Using Vagrant
This is the recommended approach for all platforms, and will install the Zulip development environment inside a VM or container and works on any platform that supports Vagrant.
The best performing way to run the Zulip development environment is using an LXC container on a Linux host, but we support other platforms such as Mac via Virtualbox (but everything will be 2-3x slower).
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If your host is Ubuntu 15.04 or newer, you can install and configure the LXC Vagrant provider directly using apt:
sudo apt-get install vagrant lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc
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If your host is Ubuntu 14.04, you will need to download a newer version of Vagrant, and then do the following:
sudo apt-get install lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir sudo dpkg -i vagrant*.deb # in directory where you downloaded vagrant vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc
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For other Linux hosts with a kernel above 3.12, follow the Vagrant LXC installation instructions to get Vagrant with LXC for your platform.
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If your host is OS X or older Linux, download VirtualBox, download Vagrant, and install them both.
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If you're on OS X and have VMWare, it should be possible to patch Vagrantfile to use the VMWare vagrant provider which should perform much better than Virtualbox. Patches to do this by default if VMWare is available are welcome!
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On Windows: You can use Vagrant and Virtualbox/VMWare on Windows with Cygwin, similar to the Mac setup. Be sure to create your git clone using
git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git -c core.autocrlf=false
to avoid Windows line endings being added to files (this causes weird errors).
Once that's done, simply change to your zulip directory and run
vagrant up
in your terminal to install the development server. This
will take a long time on the first run because Vagrant needs to
download the Ubuntu Trusty base image, but later you can run vagrant destroy
and then vagrant up
again to rebuild the environment and it
will be much faster.
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=''
To get shell access to the virtual machine running the server to run
lint, management commands, etc., 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).
At this point you should read about using the development environment.
Using provision.py without Vagrant
If you'd like to install a Zulip development environment on a server that's already running Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, you can do that by just running:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python-pbs
python /srv/zulip/provision.py
cd /srv/zulip
source /srv/zulip-venv/bin/activate
./tools/run-dev.py
Note that there is no supported uninstallation process without Vagrant
(with Vagrant, you can just do vagrant destroy
to clean up the
development environment).
By hand
If you really want to install everything by hand, the below instructions should work.
Install the following non-Python dependencies:
- libffi-dev — needed for some Python extensions
- postgresql 9.1 or later — our database (also install development headers)
- nodejs 0.10 (and npm)
- memcached (and headers)
- rabbitmq-server
- libldap2-dev
- python-dev
- redis-server — rate limiting
- tsearch-extras — better text search
- libfreetype6-dev - needed before you pip install Pillow to properly generate emoji PNGs
On Debian or Ubuntu systems:
sudo apt-get install closure-compiler libfreetype6-dev libffi-dev memcached rabbitmq-server libldap2-dev redis-server postgresql-server-dev-all libmemcached-dev python-dev hunspell-en-us nodejs nodejs-legacy npm git yui-compressor puppet gettext
# 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
Now continue with the "All systems" instructions below.
On Fedora 22 (experimental):
These instructions are experimental and may have bugs; patches welcome!
sudo dnf install libffi-devel memcached rabbitmq-server openldap-devel python-devel redis postgresql-server postgresql-devel postgresql libmemcached-devel freetype-devel nodejs npm yuicompressor closure-compiler gettext
Now continue with the Common to Fedora/CentOS instructions below.
On CentOS 7 Core (experimental):
These instructions are experimental and may have bugs; patches welcome!
# Add user zulip to the system (not necessary if you configured zulip as the administrator
# user during the install process of CentOS 7).
useradd zulip
# Create a password for zulip user
passwd zulip
# Allow zulip to sudo
visudo
# Add this line after line `root ALL=(ALL) ALL`
zulip ALL=(ALL) ALL
# Switch to zulip user
su zulip
# Enable EPEL 7 repo so we can install rabbitmq-server, redis and other dependencies
sudo yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
# Install dependencies
sudo yum install libffi-devel memcached rabbitmq-server openldap-devel python-devel redis postgresql-server \
postgresql-devel postgresql libmemcached-devel wget python-pip openssl-devel freetype-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel \
zlib-devel nodejs yuicompressor closure-compiler gettext
# We need these packages to compile tsearch-extras
sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
# clone Zulip's git repo and cd into it
cd && git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip && cd zulip/
## NEEDS TESTING: The next few DB setup items may not be required at all.
# Initialize the postgres db
sudo postgresql-setup initdb
# Edit the postgres settings:
sudo vi /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf
# Change these lines:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 ident
host all all ::1/128 ident
# to this:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5
host all all ::1/128 md5
Now continue with the Common to Fedora/CentOS instructions below.
Common to Fedora/CentOS instructions
# Build and install postgres tsearch-extras module
wget https://launchpad.net/~tabbott/+archive/ubuntu/zulip/+files/tsearch-extras_0.1.3.tar.gz
tar xvzf tsearch-extras_0.1.3.tar.gz
cd ts2
make
sudo make install
# Hack around missing dictionary files -- need to fix this to get
# the proper dictionaries from what in debian is the hunspell-en-us package.
sudo touch /usr/share/pgsql/tsearch_data/english.stop
sudo touch /usr/share/pgsql/tsearch_data/en_us.dict
sudo touch /usr/share/pgsql/tsearch_data/en_us.affix
# Edit the postgres settings:
sudo vi /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf
# Add this line before the first uncommented line to enable password auth:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5
# Start the services
sudo systemctl start redis memcached rabbitmq-server postgresql
# Enable automatic service startup after the system startup
sudo systemctl enable redis rabbitmq-server memcached postgresql
Finally continue with the All Systems instructions below.
All Systems:
pip install -r requirements.txt
npm install
./tools/download-zxcvbn
./tools/emoji_dump/build_emoji
./scripts/setup/generate_secrets.py -d
sudo cp ./puppet/zulip/files/postgresql/zulip_english.stop /usr/share/postgresql/9.3/tsearch_data/
./scripts/setup/configure-rabbitmq
./tools/postgres-init-dev-db
./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-database
./tools/postgres-init-test-db
./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-test-database
To start the development server:
./tools/run-dev.py
… and visit http://localhost:9991/.
Using the Development Environment
Once the development environment is running, you can visit
http://localhost:9991/ in your browser. By default, the development
server homepage just shows a list of the users that exist on the
server and you can login as any of them by just clicking on a user.
This setup saves time for the common case where you want to test
something other than the login process; to test the login process
you'll want to change AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS in the not-PRODUCTION
case of zproject/settings.py
from zproject.backends.DevAuthBackend
to use the auth method(s) you'd like to test.
While developing, it's helpful to watch the run-dev.py
console
output, which will show any errors your Zulip development server
encounters.
When you make a change, here's a guide for what you need to do in order to see your change take effect in Development:
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If you change Javascript or CSS, you'll just need to reload the browser window to see changes take effect.
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If you change Python code used by the the main Django/Tornado server processes, these services are run on top of Django's manage.py runserver, which will automatically restart the Zulip Django and Tornado servers whenever you save changes to Python code. You can watch this happen in the
run-dev.py
console to make sure the backend has reloaded. -
The Python queue workers don't automatically restart when you save changes (or when they stop running), so you will want to ctrl-C and then restart
run-dev.py
manually if you are testing changes to the queue workers or if a queue worker has crashed. -
If you change the database schema, you'll need to use the standard Django migrations process to create and then run your migrations; see the new feature tutorial for an example. Additionally you should check out the detailed testing docs for how to run the tests properly after doing a migration.
(In production, everything runs under supervisord and thus will
restart if it crashes, and upgrade-zulip
will take care of running
migrations and then cleanly restaring the server for you).
Running the test suite
For more details, check out the detailed testing docs.
To run all the tests, do this:
./tools/test-all
For the Vagrant environment, you'll want to first enter the environment:
vagrant ssh
source /srv/zulip-venv/bin/activate
cd /srv/zulip
This runs the linter (tools/lint-all
) 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 which can save you a lot of
time debugging a test failure, e.g.:
./tools/lint-all # Runs all the linters in parallel
./tools/test-backend zerver.test_bugdown.BugdownTest.test_inline_youtube
./tools/test-js-with-casper 10-navigation.js
./tools/test-js-with-node # Runs all node tests but is very fast
The above setup instructions include the first-time setup of test databases, but you may need to rebuild the test database occasionally if you're working on new database migrations. To do this, run:
./tools/postgres-init-test-db
./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-test-database
Possible testing issues
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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 thedo-destroy-rebuild*-database
scripts. -
When building the development environment using Vagrant and the LXC provider, if you encounter permissions errors, you may need to
chown -R 1000:$(whoami) /path/to/zulip
on the host before runningvagrant up
in order to ensure that the synced directory has the correct owner during provision. This issue will arise if you runid username
on the host whereusername
is the user running Vagrant and the output is anything but 1000. This seems to be caused by Vagrant behavior; more information can be found here https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc/wiki/FAQ#help-my-shared-folders-have-the-wrong-owner