Installing the Zulip Development environment

Using Vagrant

This is the recommended approach, and is tested on OS X 10.10 as well as Ubuntu 14.04.

• If your host is OS X, download VirtualBox from http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.30/VirtualBox-4.3.30-101610-OSX.dmg and install it.
• If your host is Ubuntu 14.04: sudo apt-get install vagrant lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir

Once that's done, simply change to your zulip directory and run vagrant up in your terminal. That will install the development server inside a Vagrant guest.

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 server whenever you save changes to Python code.

By hand

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

On Debian or Ubuntu systems: sudo apt-get install libffi-dev memcached rabbitmq-server libldap2-dev redis-server postgresql-server-dev-all libmemcached-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

Then, all versions:

pip install -r requirements.txt ./scripts/setup/configure-rabbitmq ./tools/postgres-init-db ./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-database

To start the development server: ./tools/run-dev.py

… and hit http://localhost:9991/.

Running the test suite

One-time setup of test databases: ./tools/postgres-init-test-db ./tools/do-destroy-rebuild-test-database

Run all tests: ./tools/test-all

This runs the linter 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, e.g.: ./tools/test-backend zerver.test_bugdown.BugdownTest.test_inline_youtube ./tools/test-js-with-casper 10-navigation.js

Possible issues

The Casper tests are flaky on the Virtualbox environment (probably due to some performance-sensitive races). 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.

Contributing to Zulip

Zulip welcomes all forms of contributions!

Before a pull request can be merged, you need to to sign the Dropbox Contributor License Agreement.

Please run the tests (tools/test-all) before submitting your pull request.

Zulip has a growing collection of developer documentation including detailed documentation on coding style available on Read The Docs.

Zulip also has a development discussion mailing list

Feel free to send any questions or suggestions of areas where you'd love to see more documentation to the list!

We recommend sending proposals for large features or refactorings to the zulip-devel list for discussion and advice before getting too deep into implementation.

Please report any security issues you discover to support@zulip.com.

Running Zulip in production

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