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 && vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc

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.

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
./tools/emoji_dump/build_emoji

To start the development server:

./tools/run-dev.py

… and hit http://localhost:9991/.

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

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.

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.

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

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.