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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

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 and read our commit message style guidelines.

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 [email protected].

Running Zulip in production

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

Installing the Zulip Development environment

You will need a machine with at least 2GB of RAM available (see zulip#32 for a plan for how to dramatically reduce this requirement).

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 from http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.30/VirtualBox-4.3.30-101610-OSX.dmg and install it.

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.

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

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

# 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
tools/download-zxcvbn
./tools/emoji_dump/build_emoji
generate_secrets.py -d
./scripts/setup/configure-rabbitmq
./tools/postgres-init-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 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

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.