mirror of https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git
bf5f1b5f20
In order to do development on the installer itself in a sane way, we need a reasonably fast and automatic way to get a fresh environment to try to run it in. This calls for some form of virtualization. Choices include * A public cloud, like EC2 or Digital Ocean. These could work, if we wrote some suitable scripts against their APIs, to manage appropriate base images (as AMIs or snapshots respectively) and to start fresh instances/droplets from a base image. There'd be some latency on starting a new VM, and this would also require the user to have an account on the relevant cloud with API access to create images and VMs. * A local whole-machine VM system (hypervisor) like VirtualBox or VMware, perhaps managing the configuration through Vagrant. These hypervisors can be unstable and painfully slow. They're often the only way to get development work done on a Mac or Windows machine, which is why we use them there for the normal Zulip development environment; but I don't really want to find out how their instability scales when constantly spawning fresh VMs from an image. * Containers. The new hotness, the name on everyone's lips, is Docker. But Docker is not designed for virtualizing a traditional Unix server, complete with its own init system and a fleet of processes with a shared filesystem -- in other words, the platform Zulip's installer and deployment system are for. Docker brings its own quite different model of deployment, and someday we may port Zulip from the traditional Unix server to the Docker-style deployment model, but for testing our traditional-Unix-server deployment we need a (virtualized) traditional Unix server. * Containers, with LXC. LXC provides containers that function as traditional Unix servers; because of the magic of containers, the overhead is quite low, and LXC offers handy snapshotting features so that we can quickly start up a fresh environment from a base image. Running LXC does require a Linux base system. For contributors whose local development machine isn't already Linux, the same solutions are available as for our normal development environment: the base system for running LXC could be e.g. a Vagrant-managed VirtualBox VM, or a machine in a public cloud. This commit adds a first version of such a thing, using LXC to manage a base image plus a fresh container for each test run. The test containers function as VMs: once installed, all the Zulip services run normally in them and can be managed in the normal production ways. This initial version has a shortage of usage messages or docs, and likely has some sharp edges. It also requires familiarity with the basics of LXC commands in order to make good use of the resulting containers: `lxc-ls -f`, `lxc-attach`, `lxc-stop`, and `lxc-start`, in particular. |
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