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Installing the Zulip Development environment

You will need a machine with at least 1.25GB of RAM available.

Start by cloning this repository: git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git

Using Vagrant

This is the recommended approach for all platforms, and will install the Zulip development environment inside a VM or container and works on any platform that supports Vagrant.

The best performing way to run the Zulip development environment is using an LXC container on a Linux host, but we support other platforms such as Mac via Virtualbox (but everything will be 2-3x slower).

If your host is Ubuntu 15.04 or newer, you can install and configure the LXC Vagrant provider directly using apt:
```
sudo apt-get install vagrant lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir
vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc
```
You may want to configure sudo to be passwordless when using Vagrant LXC.
If your host is Ubuntu 14.04, you will need to download a newer version of Vagrant, and then do the following:
```
sudo apt-get install lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir
sudo dpkg -i vagrant*.deb # in directory where you downloaded vagrant
vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc
```
You may want to configure sudo to be passwordless when using Vagrant LXC.
For other Linux hosts with a kernel above 3.12, follow the Vagrant LXC installation instructions to get Vagrant with LXC for your platform.
If your host is OS X or older Linux, download VirtualBox, download Vagrant, and install them both.
If you're on OS X and have VMWare, it should be possible to patch Vagrantfile to use the VMWare vagrant provider which should perform much better than Virtualbox. Patches to do this by default if VMWare is available are welcome!
On Windows: You can use Vagrant and Virtualbox/VMWare on Windows with Cygwin, similar to the Mac setup. Be sure to create your git clone using git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git -c core.autocrlf=false to avoid Windows line endings being added to files (this causes weird errors).

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=''

To get shell access to the virtual machine running the server to run lint, management commands, etc., 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).

At this point you should read about using the development environment.

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

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.

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
python /srv/zulip/provision.py

cd /srv/zulip
source /srv/zulip-venv/bin/activate
./tools/run-dev.py

Note that there is no supported uninstallation process without Vagrant (with Vagrant, you can just do vagrant destroy to clean up the development environment).

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 (client, server, headers)
nodejs 0.10 (and npm)
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:

Using the official Ubuntu repositories and tsearch-extras deb package:

sudo apt-get install closure-compiler libfreetype6-dev libffi-dev \
    memcached rabbitmq-server libldap2-dev redis-server \
    postgresql-server-dev-all libmemcached-dev python-dev \
    hunspell-en-us nodejs nodejs-legacy npm git yui-compressor \
    puppet gettext

# 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

Using the official Zulip PPA (for 14.04 Trusty):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tabbott/zulip
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install closure-compiler libfreetype6-dev libffi-dev \
    memcached rabbitmq-server libldap2-dev redis-server \
    postgresql-server-dev-all libmemcached-dev python-dev \
    hunspell-en-us nodejs nodejs-legacy npm git yui-compressor \
    puppet gettext tsearch-extras

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 \
    nodejs npm yuicompressor closure-compiler gettext

Now continue with the Common to Fedora/CentOS 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 yuicompressor \
    closure-compiler gettext

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

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

## NEEDS TESTING: The next few DB setup items may not be required at all.
# Initialize the postgres db
sudo postgresql-setup initdb

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

# 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

Now continue with the Common to Fedora/CentOS instructions below.

On OpenBSD 5.8 (experimental):

These instructions are experimental and may have bugs; patches welcome!

doas pkg_add sudo bash gcc postgresql-server redis rabbitmq \
    memcached node libmemcached py-Pillow py-cryptography py-cffi

# Get tsearch_extras and build it (using a modified version which
# aliases int4 on OpenBSD):
git clone https://github.com/blablacio/tsearch_extras
cd tsearch_extras
gmake && sudo gmake install

# Point environment to custom include locations and use newer GCC
# (needed for Node modules):
export CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/sasl"
export CXX=eg++

# Create tsearch_data directory:
sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/postgresql/tsearch_data


# 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/local/share/postgresql/tsearch_data/english.stop
sudo touch /usr/local/share/postgresql/tsearch_data/en_us.dict
sudo touch /usr/local/share/postgresql/tsearch_data/en_us.affix

Now continue with the All Systems instructions below.

Common to Fedora/CentOS instructions

# Build and install postgres tsearch-extras module
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

Finally continue with the All Systems instructions below.

All Systems:

pip install --no-deps -r requirements.txt
./tools/install-phantomjs
./tools/install-mypy
./tools/download-zxcvbn
./tools/emoji_dump/build_emoji
./scripts/setup/generate_secrets.py -d
if [ $(uname) = "OpenBSD" ]; then sudo cp ./puppet/zulip/files/postgresql/zulip_english.stop /var/postgresql/tsearch_data/; else sudo cp ./puppet/zulip/files/postgresql/zulip_english.stop /usr/share/postgresql/9.3/tsearch_data/; fi
./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
npm install

If npm install fails, the issue may be that you need a newer version of npm. You can use npm install -g npm to update your version of npm and try again.

To start the development server:

./tools/run-dev.py

… and visit http://localhost:9991/.

Proxy setup for by-hand installation

If you are building the development environment on a network where a proxy is required to access the Internet, you will need to set the proxy in the environment as follows:

On Ubuntu, set the proxy environment variables using:

export https_proxy=http://proxy_host:port
export http_proxy=http://proxy_host:port

And set the npm proxy and https-proxy using:

npm config set proxy http://proxy_host:port
npm config set https-proxy http://proxy_host:port

Using Docker (experimental)

The docker instructions for development are experimental, so they may have bugs. If you try them and run into any issues, please report them!

You can also use Docker to run a Zulip development environment. First, you need to install Docker in your development machine following the instructions. Some other interesting links for somebody new in Docker are:

Then you should create the Docker image based on Ubuntu Linux, first go to the directory with the Zulip source code:

docker build -t user/zulipdev .

Now you're going to install Zulip dependencies in the image:

docker run -itv $(pwd):/srv/zulip -p 80:9991 user/zulipdev /bin/bash
$ /usr/bin/python /srv/zulip/provision.py --docker
docker ps -af ancestor=user/zulipdev
docker commit -m "Zulip installed" <container id> user/zulipdev:v2

Finally you can run the docker server with:

docker run -itv $(pwd):/srv/zulip -p 80:9991 user/zulipdev:v2 \
    /srv/zulip/scripts/start-dockers

If you want to connect to the Docker instance to build a release tarball you can use:

docker ps
docker exec -it <container id> /bin/bash
$ source /home/zulip/.bash_profile
$ <Your commands>
$ exit

To stop the server use:

docker ps
docker kill <container id>

If you want to run all the tests you need to start the servers first, you can do it with:

docker run -itv $(pwd):/srv/zulip user/zulipdev:v2 /bin/bash
$ scripts/test-all-docker

You can modify the source code in your development machine and review the results in your browser.

Using the Development Environment

Once the development environment is running, you can visit http://localhost:9991/ in your browser. By default, the development server homepage just shows a list of the users that exist on the server and you can login as any of them by just clicking on a user. This setup saves time for the common case where you want to test something other than the login process; to test the login process you'll want to change AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS in the not-PRODUCTION case of zproject/settings.py from zproject.backends.DevAuthBackend to use the auth method(s) you'd like to test.

While developing, it's helpful to watch the run-dev.py console output, which will show any errors your Zulip development server encounters.

When you make a change, here's a guide for what you need to do in order to see your change take effect in Development:

If you change Javascript or CSS, you'll just need to reload the browser window to see changes take effect.
If you change Python code used by the the main Django/Tornado server processes, these services are run on top of Django's manage.py runserver which will automatically restart the Zulip Django and Tornado servers whenever you save changes to Python code. You can watch this happen in the run-dev.py console to make sure the backend has reloaded.
The Python queue workers don't automatically restart when you save changes (or when they stop running), so you will want 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.
If you change the database schema, you'll need to use the standard Django migrations process to create and then run your migrations; see the new feature tutorial for an example. Additionally you should check out the detailed testing docs for how to run the tests properly after doing a migration.

(In production, everything runs under supervisord and thus will restart if it crashes, and upgrade-zulip will take care of running migrations and then cleanly restaring the server for you).

Running the test suite

For more details, especially on how to write tests, check out the detailed testing docs.

To run all the tests, do this:

./tools/test-all

For the Vagrant environment, you'll want to first enter the environment:

vagrant ssh
source /srv/zulip-venv/bin/activate
cd /srv/zulip

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/lint-all # Runs all the linters in parallel
./tools/test-backend zerver.tests.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 setup 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

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; for more information, see [the vagrant-lxc FAQ entry about shared folder permissions ][lxc-sf].

[lxc-sf]: https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc/wiki/FAQ#help-my-shared-folders-have-the-wrong-owner)

19 KiB Raw Blame History

Installing the Zulip Development environment

Using Vagrant

Specifying a proxy

Using provision.py without Vagrant

By hand

On Debian or Ubuntu systems:

On Fedora 22 (experimental):

On CentOS 7 Core (experimental):

On OpenBSD 5.8 (experimental):

Common to Fedora/CentOS instructions

All Systems:

Proxy setup for by-hand installation

Using Docker (experimental)

Using the Development Environment

Running the test suite

Possible testing issues

19 KiB

Raw Blame History