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Zulip

Zulip is a powerful, open source group chat application. Written in Python and using the Django framework, Zulip supports both private messaging and group chats via conversation streams.

Zulip also supports fast search, drag-and-drop file uploads, image previews, group private messages, audible notifications, missed-message emails, desktop apps, and much more.

Further information on the Zulip project and its features can be found at https://www.zulip.org.

Running Zulip in production

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

Contributing to Zulip

Zulip welcomes all forms of contributions! The page documents the Zulip development process.

How to get involved with contributing to Zulip

First, subscribe to the Zulip development discussion mailing list.

The Zulip project uses a system of labels in our issue tracker to make it easy to find a project if you don't have your own project idea in mind or want to get some experience with working on Zulip before embarking on a larger project you have in mind:

  • Bite Size: Smaller projects that could be a great first contribution.
  • Integrations. Integrate Zulip with another piece of software and contribute it back to the community! Writing an integration can be a great started project. There's some brief documentation on the best way to write integrations at https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/70.
  • Documentation. The Zulip project loves contributions of new documentation.
  • Help Wanted: A broader list of projects that nobody is currently working on.
  • Platform support. These are open issues about making it possible to install Zulip on a wider range of platforms.
  • Bugs. Open bugs.
  • Feature requests. Browsing this list can be a great way to find feature ideas to implement that other Zulip users are excited about.

If you're excited about helping with an open issue, just post on the conversation thread that you're working on it. You're encouraged to ask questions on how to best implement or debug your changes -- the Zulip maintainers are excited to answer questions to help you stay unblocked and working efficiently.

We also welcome suggestions of features that you feel would be valuable or changes that you feel would make Zulip a better open source project, and are happy to support you in adding new features or other user experience improvements to Zulip.

If you have a new feature you'd like to add, we recommend you start by opening a GitHub issue about the feature idea explaining the problem that you're hoping to solve and that you're excited to work on it. A Zulip maintainer will usually reply within a day with feedback on the idea, notes on any important issues or concerns, and and often tips on how to implement or test it. Please feel free to ping the thread if you don't hear a response from the maintainers -- we try to be very responsive so this usually means we missed your message.

For significant changes to the visual design, user experience, data model, or architecture, we highly recommend posting a mockup, screenshot, or description of what you have in mind to zulip-devel@ to get broad feedback before you spend too much time on implementation details.

Finally, before implementing a larger feature, we highly recommend looking at the new feature tutorial and coding style guidelines on ReadTheDocs.

Feedback on how to make this development process more efficient, fun, and friendly to new contributors is very welcome! Just shoot an email to the Zulip Developers list with your thoughts.

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):

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

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

License

Copyright 2011-2015 Dropbox, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

The software includes some works released by third parties under other free and open source licenses. Those works are redistributed under the license terms under which the works were received. For more details, see the THIRDPARTY file included with this distribution.