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zulip/docs/development/setup-recommended.md

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Recommended environment setup tutorial

This section guides first-time contributors through installing the Zulip development environment on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The recommended method for installing the Zulip development environment is to use WSL 2 on Windows, and Vagrant with Docker on macOS and Linux. This method uses the Windows Subsystem for Linux or creates a Linux container (for macOS and Linux) inside which the Zulip server and all related services will run.

Contents:

If you encounter errors installing the Zulip development environment, check troubleshooting and common errors. If that doesn't help, please visit #provision help in the Zulip development community server for real-time help or file an issue.

When reporting your issue, please include the following information:

  • host operating system
  • installation method (Vagrant or direct)
  • whether or not you are using a proxy
  • a copy of Zulip's vagrant provisioning logs, available in /var/log/provision.log on your virtual machine

Requirements

Installing the Zulip development environment requires downloading several hundred megabytes of dependencies. You will need an active internet connection throughout the entire installation processes. (See Specifying a proxy if you need a proxy to access the internet.)

  • 2GB available RAM
  • active broadband internet connection
  • GitHub account

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows :sync: os-windows :name: windows-10-or-11

  • Windows 64-bit (Windows 10 recommended)
  • hardware virtualization enabled (VT-x or AMD-V)
  • administrator access :::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

  • macOS (10.11 El Capitan or newer recommended) :::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

  • Ubuntu 22.04, or 24.04
  • Debian 12 :::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

  • tested for Fedora 36 :::

::::

Other Linux distributions work great too, but we don't maintain documentation for installing Vagrant and Docker on those systems, so you'll need to find a separate guide and crib from these docs.

Step 0: Set up Git & GitHub

You can skip this step if you already have Git, GitHub, and SSH access to GitHub working on your machine.

Follow our Git guide in order to install Git, set up a GitHub account, create an SSH key to access code on GitHub efficiently, etc. Be sure to create an SSH key and add it to your GitHub account using these instructions.

Step 1: Install prerequisites

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows :sync: os-windows

Zulip's development environment is most easily set up on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2) installation method described here. We require version 0.67.6+ of WSL 2.

  1. Enable virtualization through your BIOS settings. This sequence depends on your specific hardware and brand, but here are some basic instructions.

  2. Install WSL 2.

  3. It is required to enable systemd for WSL 2 to manage the database, cache and other services. To configure it, please follow these instructions. Then, you will need to restart WSL 2 before continuing.

  4. Launch the Ubuntu shell as an administrator and run the following command:

    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

  5. Install dependencies with the following command:

    $ sudo apt install rabbitmq-server memcached redis-server postgresql

  6. Open /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-env.conf using e.g.,:

    $ sudo nano /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-env.conf

    Confirm the following lines are at the end of your file, and add them if not present:

    NODE_IP_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
NODE_PORT=5672

    Then save your changes (Ctrl+O, then Enter to confirm the path), and exit nano (Ctrl+X).

  7. Run the command below to make sure you are inside the WSL disk and not in a Windows mounted disk. You will run into permission issues if you run ./tools/provision from zulip in a Windows mounted disk.

    $ cd ~  # or cd /home/USERNAME

  8. Create a new SSH key for the WSL 2 virtual machine and add it to your GitHub account. Note that SSH keys linked to your Windows computer will not work within the virtual machine.

WSL 2 can be uninstalled by following Microsoft's documentation

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

  1. Install Vagrant (latest).
  2. Install Docker Desktop (latest).
  3. Open the Docker desktop app's settings panel, and choose osxfs (legacy) under "Choose file sharing implementation for your containers." :::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

1. Install Vagrant, Docker, and Git
$ sudo apt install vagrant docker.io git

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

1. Install Vagrant, Docker, and Git
$ sudo yum install vagrant git moby-engine

Fedora does not include the official docker-ce package in their repositories. They provide the package moby-engine which you can choose instead. In case you prefer the official docker distribution, you can follow their documentation to install Docker on Fedora.

:::

::::

Step 2: Get Zulip code

  1. In your browser, visit https://github.com/zulip/zulip and click the Fork button. You will need to be logged in to GitHub to do this.
  2. Open Terminal (macOS/Linux) or Git BASH (Windows; must run as an Administrator).
  3. In Terminal/Git BASH, clone your fork of the Zulip repository and connect the Zulip upstream repository:
$ git clone --config pull.rebase git@github.com:YOURUSERNAME/zulip.git
$ cd zulip
$ git remote add -f upstream https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git

This will create a zulip directory and download the Zulip code into it.

Don't forget to replace YOURUSERNAME with your Git username. You will see something like:

$ git clone --config pull.rebase git@github.com:YOURUSERNAME/zulip.git
Cloning into 'zulip'...
remote: Counting objects: 73571, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 73571 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 73569
Receiving objects: 100% (73571/73571), 105.30 MiB | 6.46 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (51448/51448), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Checking out files: 100% (1912/1912), done.

Step 3: Start the development environment

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows (WSL) :sync: os-windows

Run the following to install the Zulip development environment and start it. (If Windows Firewall creates popups to block services, simply click Allow access.)

$ # Install/update the Zulip development environment
$ ./tools/provision
$ # Enter the Zulip Python environment
$ source /srv/zulip-py3-venv/bin/activate
$ # Start the development server
$ ./tools/run-dev

If you are facing problems or you see error messages after running ./tools/run-dev, you can try running ./tools/provision again. :::

:::{tab-item} Windows (VM) :sync: os-windows-vm

Change into the zulip directory and tell Vagrant to start the Zulip development environment with vagrant up:

$ cd zulip
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
$ vagrant up --provider=virtualbox

On Windows, you will see the message The system cannot find the path specified. several times. This is normal and is not a problem.

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

Change into the zulip directory and tell Vagrant to start the Zulip development environment with vagrant up:

$ cd zulip
$ vagrant up --provider=docker

Important note: There is a known upstream issue on macOS that can cause provisioning to fail with ERR_PNPM_LINKING_FAILED or other errors. The temporary fix is to open the Docker desktop app's settings panel, and choose osxfs (legacy) under "Choose file sharing implementation for your containers." Once Docker restarts, you should be able to successfully run vagrant up --provider=docker. Back in Docker, you can return to using VirtioFS for better system performance while developing, but you may need to revert to osxfs (legacy) whenever you need to re-provision.

:::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

Change into the zulip directory and tell Vagrant to start the Zulip development environment with vagrant up:

$ cd zulip
$ vagrant up --provider=docker

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

Change into the zulip directory and tell Vagrant to start the Zulip development environment with vagrant up:

$ cd zulip
$ vagrant up --provider=docker

:::

::::

Step 4: Developing

Where to edit files

You'll work by editing files on your host machine, in the directory where you cloned Zulip. Use your favorite editor (Sublime, Atom, Vim, Emacs, Notepad++, etc.).

When you save changes they will be synced automatically to the Zulip development environment on the virtual machine/container.

Each component of the Zulip development server will automatically restart itself or reload data appropriately when you make changes. So, to see your changes, all you usually have to do is reload your browser. More details on how this works are available below.

Zulip's whitespace rules are all enforced by linters, so be sure to run tools/lint often to make sure you're following our coding style (or use tools/setup-git-repo to run it on just the changed files automatically whenever you commit).

VSCode setup (optional)

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows (WSL) :sync: os-windows

The Visual Studio Code Remote - WSL extension is recommended for editing files when developing with WSL. When you have it installed, you can run:

$ code .

to open VS Code connected to your WSL environment. See the Remote development in WSL tutorial for more information. :::

:::{tab-item} Windows (VM) :sync: os-windows-vm

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

:::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

:::

::::

Understanding run-dev debugging output

It's good to have the terminal running ./tools/run-dev up as you work since error messages including tracebacks along with every backend request will be printed there.

See Logging for further details on the run-dev console output.

Committing and pushing changes with Git

When you're ready to commit or push changes via Git, you will do this by running Git commands in Terminal (macOS/Linux) or Git BASH (Windows) in the directory where you cloned Zulip on your main machine.

If you're new to working with Git/GitHub, check out our Git & GitHub guide.

Maintaining the development environment

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows (WSL) :sync: os-windows

If after rebasing onto a new version of the Zulip server, you receive new errors while starting the Zulip server or running tests, this is probably not because Zulip's main branch is broken. Instead, this is likely because we've recently merged changes to the development environment provisioning process that you need to apply to your development environment. To update your environment, you'll need to re-provision using tools/provision from your Zulip checkout; this should complete in about a minute.

After provisioning, you'll want to (re)start the Zulip development server.

If you run into any trouble, #provision help in the Zulip development community server is a great place to ask for help.

:::

:::{tab-item} Windows (VM) :sync: os-windows-vm

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

:::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

:::

::::

Rebuilding the development environment

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows (WSL) :sync: os-windows

:::

:::{tab-item} Windows (VM) :sync: os-windows-vm

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

:::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

:::

::::

Shutting down the development environment for use later

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows (WSL) :sync: os-windows

On Windows with WSL 2, you do not need to shut down the environment. Simply close your terminal window(s). :::

:::{tab-item} Windows (VM) :sync: os-windows-vm

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

:::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

:::

::::

Resuming the development environment

::::{tab-set}

:::{tab-item} Windows (WSL) :sync: os-windows

On Windows with WSL 2, to resume developing you just need to open a new Git BASH window. Then change into your zulip folder and verify the Python environment was properly activated (you will see (zulip-py3-venv)). If the (zulip-py3-venv) part is missing, run source /srv/zulip-py3-venv/bin/activate. :::

:::{tab-item} Windows (VM) :sync: os-windows-vm

:::

:::{tab-item} macOS :sync: os-mac

:::

:::{tab-item} Ubuntu/Debian :sync: os-ubuntu

:::

:::{tab-item} Fedora :sync: os-fedora

:::

::::

Next steps

Next, read the following to learn more about developing for Zulip:

Troubleshooting and common errors

Below you'll find a list of common errors and their solutions. Most issues are resolved by just provisioning again (by running ./tools/provision (from /srv/zulip) inside the Vagrant guest or equivalently vagrant provision from outside).

If these solutions aren't working for you or you encounter an issue not documented below, there are a few ways to get further help:

When reporting your issue, please include the following information:

  • host operating system
  • installation method (Vagrant or direct)
  • whether or not you are using a proxy
  • a copy of Zulip's vagrant provisioning logs, available in /var/log/provision.log on your virtual machine. If you choose to post just the error output, please include the beginning of the error output, not just the last few lines.

The output of tools/diagnose run inside the Vagrant guest is also usually helpful.

Vagrant guest doesn't show (zulip-py3-venv) at start of prompt

This is caused by provisioning failing to complete successfully. You can see the errors in var/log/provision.log; it should end with something like this:

ESC[94mZulip development environment setup succeeded!ESC[0m

The ESC stuff are the terminal color codes that make it show as a nice blue in the terminal, which unfortunately looks ugly in the logs.

If you encounter an incomplete /var/log/provision.log file, you need to update your environment. Re-provision your Vagrant machine; if the problem persists, please come chat with us (see instructions above) for help.

After you provision successfully, you'll need to exit your vagrant ssh shell and run vagrant ssh again to get the virtualenv setup properly.

Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders

For the following error:

Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders. This is usually
because the filesystem "vboxsf" is not available. This filesystem is
made available via the VirtualBox Guest Additions and kernel
module. Please verify that these guest additions are properly
installed in the guest. This is not a bug in Vagrant and is usually
caused by a faulty Vagrant box. For context, the command attempted
was:

 mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 keys /keys

If this error starts happening unexpectedly, then just run:

$ vagrant halt
$ vagrant up

to reboot the guest. After this, you can do vagrant provision and vagrant ssh.

ssl read error

If you receive the following error while running vagrant up:

SSL read: error:00000000:lib(0):func(0):reason(0), errno 104

It means that either your network connection is unstable and/or very slow. To resolve it, run vagrant up until it works (possibly on a better network connection).

Unmet dependencies error

When running vagrant up or provision, if you see the following error:

==> default: E:unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

It means that your local apt repository has been corrupted, which can usually be resolved by executing the command:

$ apt-get -f install

ssh connection closed by remote host

On running vagrant ssh, if you see the following error:

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

It usually means the Vagrant guest is not running, which is usually solved by rebooting the Vagrant guest via vagrant halt; vagrant up. See Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine for more details.

os.symlink error

If you receive the following error while running vagrant up:

==> default: Traceback (most recent call last):
==> default: File "./emoji_dump.py", line 75, in <module>
==> default:
==> default: os.symlink('unicode/{}.png'.format(code_point), 'out/{}.png'.format(name))
==> default: OSError
==> default: :
==> default: [Errno 71] Protocol error

Then Vagrant was not able to create a symbolic link.

First, if you are using Windows, make sure you have run Git BASH (or Cygwin) as an administrator. By default, only administrators can create symbolic links on Windows. Additionally UAC, a Windows feature intended to limit the impact of malware, can prevent even administrator accounts from creating symlinks. Turning off UAC will allow you to create symlinks. You can also try some of the solutions mentioned here.

If you ran Git BASH as administrator but you already had VirtualBox running, you might still get this error because VirtualBox is not running as administrator. In that case: close the Zulip VM with vagrant halt; close any other VirtualBox VMs that may be running; exit VirtualBox; and try again with vagrant up --provision from a Git BASH running as administrator.

Second, VirtualBox does not enable symbolic links by default. Vagrant starting with version 1.6.0 enables symbolic links for VirtualBox shared folder.

You can check to see that this is enabled for your virtual machine with vboxmanage command.

Get the name of your virtual machine by running vboxmanage list vms and then print out the custom settings for this virtual machine with vboxmanage getextradata YOURVMNAME enumerate:

$ vboxmanage list vms
"zulip_default_1462498139595_55484" {5a65199d-8afa-4265-b2f6-6b1f162f157d}

$ vboxmanage getextradata zulip_default_1462498139595_55484 enumerate
Key: VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/srv_zulip, Value: 1
Key: supported, Value: false

If you see "command not found" when you try to run VBoxManage, you need to add the VirtualBox directory to your path. On Windows this is mostly likely C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\.

If vboxmanage enumerate prints nothing, or shows a value of 0 for VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/srv_zulip, then enable symbolic links by running this command in Terminal/Git BASH/Cygwin:

$ vboxmanage setextradata YOURVMNAME VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/srv_zulip 1

The virtual machine needs to be shut down when you run this command.

Hyper-V error messages

If you get an error message on Windows about lack of Windows Home support for Hyper-V when running vagrant up, the problem is that Windows is incorrectly attempting to use Hyper-V rather than Virtualbox as the virtualization provider. You can fix this by explicitly passing the virtualbox provider to vagrant up:

$ vagrant up --provide=virtualbox

Connection timeout on vagrant up

If you see the following error after running vagrant up:

default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2222
default: SSH username: vagrant
default: SSH auth method: private key
default: Error: Connection timeout. Retrying...
default: Error: Connection timeout. Retrying...
default: Error: Connection timeout. Retrying...

A likely cause is that hardware virtualization is not enabled for your computer. This must be done via your computer's BIOS settings. Look for a setting called VT-x (Intel) or (AMD-V).

If this is already enabled in your BIOS, double-check that you are running a 64-bit operating system.

For further information about troubleshooting Vagrant timeout errors see this post.

Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine

If you see the following error when you run vagrant up:

Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that
Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within
the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period.

If you look above, you should be able to see the error(s) that
Vagrant had when attempting to connect to the machine. These errors
are usually good hints as to what may be wrong.

If you're using a custom box, make sure that networking is properly
working and you're able to connect to the machine. It is a common
problem that networking isn't setup properly in these boxes.
Verify that authentication configurations are also setup properly,
as well.

If the box appears to be booting properly, you may want to increase
the timeout ("config.vm.boot_timeout") value.

This has a range of possible causes, that usually amount to a bug in Virtualbox or Vagrant. If you see this error, you usually can fix it by rebooting the guest via vagrant halt; vagrant up.

Vagrant up fails with subprocess.CalledProcessError

The vagrant up command basically does the following:

  • Downloads an Ubuntu image and starts it using a Vagrant provider.
  • Uses vagrant ssh to connect to that Ubuntu guest, and then runs tools/provision, which has a lot of subcommands that are executed via Python's subprocess module. These errors mean that one of those subcommands failed.

To debug such errors, you can log in to the Vagrant guest machine by running vagrant ssh, which should present you with a standard shell prompt. You can debug interactively by using e.g., cd zulip && ./tools/provision, and then running the individual subcommands that failed. Once you've resolved the problem, you can rerun tools/provision to proceed; the provisioning system is designed to recover well from failures.

The Zulip provisioning system is generally highly reliable; the most common cause of issues here is a poor network connection (or one where you need a proxy to access the Internet and haven't configured the development environment to use it.

Once you've provisioned successfully, you'll get output like this:

Zulip development environment setup succeeded!
(zulip-py3-venv) vagrant@vagrant:/srv/zulip$

If the (zulip-py3-venv) part is missing, this is because your installation failed the first time before the Zulip virtualenv was created. You can fix this by just closing the shell and running vagrant ssh again, or using source /srv/zulip-py3-venv/bin/activate.

Finally, if you encounter any issues that weren't caused by your Internet connection, please report them! We try hard to keep Zulip development environment provisioning free of bugs.

pip install fails during vagrant up on Linux

Likely causes are:

  1. Networking issues
  2. Insufficient RAM. Check whether you've allotted at least two gigabytes of RAM, which is the minimum Zulip requires. If not, go to your VM settings and increase the RAM, then restart the VM.

VBoxManage errors related to VT-x or WHvSetupPartition

There was an error while executing `VBoxManage`, a CLI used by Vagrant
for controlling VirtualBox. The command and stderr is shown below.

Command: ["startvm", "8924a681-b4e4-4b7a-96f2-4cb11619f123", "--type", "headless"]

Stderr: VBoxManage.exe: error: (VERR_NEM_MISSING_KERNEL_API).
VBoxManage.exe: error: VT-x is not available (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX)
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_FAIL (0x80004005), component ConsoleWrap, interface IConsole

or

Stderr: VBoxManage.exe: error: Call to WHvSetupPartition failed: ERROR_SUCCESS (Last=0xc000000d/87) (VERR_NEM_VM_CREATE_FAILED)
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_FAIL (0x80004005), component ConsoleWrap, interface IConsole

First, ensure that hardware virtualization support (VT-x or AMD-V) is enabled in your BIOS.

If the error persists, you may have run into an incompatibility between VirtualBox and Hyper-V on Windows. To disable Hyper-V, open command prompt as administrator, run bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off, and reboot. If you need to enable it later, run bcdedit /deletevalue hypervisorlaunchtype, and reboot.

OSError: [Errno 26] Text file busy

default: Traceback (most recent call last):
…
default:   File "/srv/zulip-py3-venv/lib/python3.6/shutil.py", line 426, in _rmtree_safe_fd
default:     os.rmdir(name, dir_fd=topfd)
default: OSError: [Errno 26] Text file busy: 'baremetrics'

This error is caused by a bug in recent versions of the VirtualBox Guest Additions for Linux on Windows hosts. You can check the running version of VirtualBox Guest Additions with this command:

$ vagrant ssh -- 'sudo modinfo -F version vboxsf'

The bug has not been fixed upstream as of this writing, but you may be able to work around it by downgrading VirtualBox Guest Additions to 5.2.44. To do this, create a ~/.zulip-vagrant-config file and add this line:

VBOXADD_VERSION 5.2.44

Then run these commands (yes, reload is needed twice):

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
$ vagrant reload
$ vagrant reload --provision

Specifying an Ubuntu mirror

Bringing up a development environment for the first time involves downloading many packages from the Ubuntu archive. The Ubuntu cloud images use the global mirror http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ by default, but you may find that you can speed up the download by using a local mirror closer to your location. To do this, create ~/.zulip-vagrant-config and add a line like this, replacing the URL as appropriate:

UBUNTU_MIRROR http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

Specifying a proxy

If you need to use a proxy server to access the Internet, you will need to specify the proxy settings before running vagrant up. First, install the Vagrant plugin vagrant-proxyconf:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-proxyconf

Then create ~/.zulip-vagrant-config and add the following lines to it (with the appropriate values in it for your proxy):

HTTP_PROXY http://proxy_host:port
HTTPS_PROXY http://proxy_host:port
NO_PROXY localhost,127.0.0.1,.example.com,.zulipdev.com

For proxies that require authentication, the config will be a bit more complex, e.g.,:

HTTP_PROXY http://userName:userPassword@192.168.1.1:8080
HTTPS_PROXY http://userName:userPassword@192.168.1.1:8080
NO_PROXY localhost,127.0.0.1,.example.com,.zulipdev.com

You'll want to double-check your work for mistakes (a common one is using https:// when your proxy expects http://). Invalid proxy configuration can cause confusing/weird exceptions; if you're using a proxy and get an error, the first thing you should investigate is whether you entered your proxy configuration correctly.

Now run vagrant up in your terminal to install the development server. If you ran vagrant up before and failed, you'll need to run vagrant destroy first to clean up the failed installation.

If you no longer want to use proxy with Vagrant, you can remove the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY lines in ~/.zulip-vagrant-config and then do a vagrant reload.

Using a different port for Vagrant

You can also change the port on the host machine that Vagrant uses by adding to your ~/.zulip-vagrant-config file. E.g., if you set:

HOST_PORT 9971

(and vagrant reload to apply the new configuration), then you would visit http://localhost:9971/ to connect to your development server.

If you'd like to be able to connect to your development environment from other machines than the VM host, you can manually set the host IP address in the ~/.zulip-vagrant-config file as well. For example, if you set:

HOST_IP_ADDR 0.0.0.0

(and restart the Vagrant guest with vagrant reload), your host IP would be 0.0.0.0, a special value for the IP address that means any IP address can connect to your development server.

Customizing CPU and RAM allocation

When running Vagrant using a VM-based provider such as VirtualBox or VMware Fusion, CPU and RAM resources must be explicitly allocated to the guest system (with Docker and other container-based Vagrant providers, explicit allocation is unnecessary and the settings described here are ignored).

Our default Vagrant settings allocate 2 CPUs with 2 GiB of memory for the guest, which is sufficient to run everything in the development environment. If your host system has more CPUs, or you have enough RAM that you'd like to allocate more than 2 GiB to the guest, you can improve performance of the Zulip development environment by allocating more resources.

To do so, create a ~/.zulip-vagrant-config file containing the following lines:

GUEST_CPUS <number of cpus>
GUEST_MEMORY_MB <system memory (in MB)>

For example:

GUEST_CPUS 4
GUEST_MEMORY_MB 8192

would result in an allocation of 4 CPUs and 8 GiB of memory to the guest VM.

After changing the configuration, run vagrant reload to reboot the guest VM with your new configuration.

If at any time you wish to revert back to the default settings, simply remove the GUEST_CPUS and GUEST_MEMORY_MB lines from ~/.zulip-vagrant-config.