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Production Installation on Existing Ubuntu Server
Here are some tips for installing the latest release Zulip on a production server running Ubuntu. The Zulip installation scripts assume that it has carte blanche to overwrite your configuration files in /etc, so we recommend against installing it on a server running other nginx or django apps.
But if you do, here are some things you can do that may make it possible to retain your existing site. However, this is NOT recommended, and you may break your server. Make sure you have backups and a provisioning script ready to go to wipe and restore your existing services if (when) your server goes down.
These instructions are only for experts. If you're not an experiecned Linux sysadmin, you will have a much better experience if you get a dedicated VM to install Zulip on instead (or use zulipchat.com.
Nginx
Copy your existing nginx configuration to a backup and then merge the one created by Zulip into it:
$ sudo cp /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx.conf.before-zulip-install
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zulip/zulip/master/puppet/zulip/files/nginx/nginx.conf -O /tmp/nginx.conf.zulip
$ sudo meld /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /tmp/nginx.conf.zulip # be sure to merge to the right
After the zulip installation completes, then you can overwrite (or merge) your new nginx.conf with the installed one:
$ sudo meld /tmp/nginx.conf.zulip /etc/nginx/nginx.conf # be sure to merge to the right
$ sudo service nginx restart
Zulip's puppet configuration will change the ownership of
/var/log/nginx so that the zulip user can access it. Depending on
your configuration, this may or may not cause problems.
Upstart
The latest releases of Ubuntu (later than 16.04 Xenial) have
deprecated upstart in favor of systemd. Unfortunately,
Ubuntu 16.04 often still has upstart installed, which can cause
various services like nginx to not start properly (because they
auto-detect that upstart is present, and try to use that, rather
than systemd). you can remove it as follows:
$ sudo apt remove upstart
Puppet
If you have a puppet server running on your server, you will get an error message about not being able to connect to the client during the install process:
puppet-agent[29873]: Could not request certificate: Failed to open TCP connection to puppet:8140
So you'll need to shutdown any puppet servers.
$ sudo service puppet-agent stop
$ sudo service puppet stop
Postgres
If you have an existing postgres database, note that Zulip will use
the default main as its database name; make sure you're not using
that.
Memcached, redis, and rabbitmq
Zulip will, by default, configure these services for its use. The configuration we use is pretty basic, but if you're using them for something else, you'll want to make sure the configurations are compatible.
No uninstall process
We don't provide a convenient way to uninstall a Zulip server.
No support, but contributions welcome!
Most of the limitations are things we'd accept a pull request to fix; we welcome contributions to shrink this list of gotchas. Chat with us in the chat.zulip.org community if you're interested in helping!