zulip/README.dev.md

11 KiB

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, and is tested on OS X 10.10 as well as Ubuntu 14.04.

  • The best performing way to run the Zulip development environment is using an LXC container. If your host is Ubuntu 14.04 (or newer; what matters is having support for LXC containers), you'll want to install and configure the LXC Vagrant provider like this: sudo apt-get install vagrant lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir && vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc

  • If your host is OS X, download VirtualBox, download Vagrant, and install them both.

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=''

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 Django and Tornado servers whenever you save changes to Python code.

However, the Zulip queue workers will not automatically restart when you save changes, so you will need 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.

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

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)
  • 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 libffi-dev memcached rabbitmq-server libldap2-dev python-dev redis-server postgresql-server-dev-all libmemcached-dev libfreetype6-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

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
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

Now continue with the All Systems 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

# We need these packages to compile tsearch-extras
sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

cd && 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 -j $(nproc)
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

# clone Zulip's git repo and cd into it
cd && git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip && cd zulip/

# Initialize the postgres db
sudo postgresql-setup initdb

# Edit the postgres settings:
sudo vi /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

# Add these two lines after line 80:
local   zulip           zulip                                   md5
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            md5

# 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

# Start the services
sudo systemctl start redis rabbitmq-server memcached postgresql

# Enable automatic service startup after the system startup
sudo systemctl enable redis rabbitmq-server memcached postgresql

Now continue with the All Systems instructions below.

All Systems:

pip install -r requirements.txt
./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/.

Running the test suite

Run all tests:

./tools/test-all

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/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 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

  • The Casper tests are flaky on the Virtualbox environment (probably due to some performance-sensitive races; they work reliably in Travis CI). 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.

  • 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 running vagrant up in order to ensure that the synced directory has the correct owner during provision. This issue will arise if you run id username on the host where username 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