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Zulip in production

This documents the process for installing Zulip in a production environment.

Note that if you just want to play around with Zulip and see what it looks like, it is easier to install it in a development environment following the instructions in README.dev, since then you don't need to worry about setting up SSL certificates and an authentication mechanism.

Recommended requirements:

  • Server running Ubuntu Precise or Debian Wheezy
  • At least 2 CPUs for production use with 100+ users
  • At least 4GB of RAM for production use with 100+ users. We strongly recommend against installing with less than 2GB of RAM, as you will likely experience OOM issues. In the future we expect Zulip's RAM requirements to decrease to support smaller installations (see zulip#32).
  • At least 10GB of free disk for production use (more may be required if you intend to store uploaded files locally rather than in S3 and your team uses that feature extensively)
  • Outgoing HTTP(S) access to the public Internet.
  • SSL Certificate for the host you're putting this on (e.g. zulip.example.com). If you just want to see what Zulip looks like, we recommend installing the development environment detailed in README.md as that is easier to setup.
  • Email credentials Zulip can use to send outgoing emails to users (e.g. email address confirmation emails during the signup process, missed message notifications, password reminders if you're not using SSO, etc.).

Installing Zulip in production

These instructions should be followed as root.

(1) Install the SSL certificates for your machine to /etc/ssl/private/zulip.key and /etc/ssl/certs/zulip.combined-chain.crt. If you don't know how to generate an SSL certificate, you, you can do the following to generate a self-signed certificate:

apt-get install openssl
openssl genrsa -des3 -passout pass:x -out server.pass.key 4096
openssl rsa -passin pass:x -in server.pass.key -out zulip.key
rm server.pass.key
openssl req -new -key zulip.key -out server.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey zulip.key -out zulip.combined-chain.crt
rm server.csr
cp zulip.key /etc/ssl/private/zulip.key
cp zulip.combined-chain.crt /etc/ssl/certs/zulip.combined-chain.crt

You will eventually want to get a properly signed certificate (and note that at present the Zulip desktop app doesn't support self-signed certificates), but this will let you finish the installation process.

(2) Download the latest built server tarball and unpack it to /root/zulip, e.g.

wget https://www.zulip.com/dist/releases/zulip-server-latest.tar.gz
tar -xf zulip-server-latest.tar.gz
mv zulip-server-1.3.6 /root/zulip

(3) Run

/root/zulip/scripts/setup/install

This may take a while to run, since it will install a large number of packages via apt.

(4) Configure the Zulip server instance by filling in the settings in /etc/zulip/settings.py. Be sure to fill in all the mandatory settings, enable at least one authentication mechanism, and do the configuration required for that authentication mechanism to work. See the section on "Authentication" below for more detail on configuring authentication mechanisms.

(5) Run

su zulip -c /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/initialize-database

This will report an error if you did not fill in all the mandatory settings from /etc/zulip/settings.py. Once this completes successfully, the main installation process will be complete, and if you are planning on using password authentication, you should be able to visit the URL for your server and register for an account.

(6) Subscribe to the Zulip announcements Google Group to get announcements about new releases, security issues, etc.

Authentication and logging into Zulip the first time

(As you read and follow the instructions in this section, if you run into trouble, check out the troubleshooting advice in the next major section.)

Once you've finished installing Zulip, configuring your settings.py file, and initializing the database, it's time to login to your new installation. By default, initialize-database creates 1 realm that you can join, the ADMIN_DOMAIN realm (defined in /etc/zulip/settings.py).

The ADMIN_DOMAIN realm is by default configured with the following settings:

  • restricted_to_domain=True: Only people with emails ending with @ADMIN_DOMAIN can join.
  • invite_required=False: An invitation is not required to join the realm.
  • invite_by_admin_only=False: You don't need to be an admin user to invite other users.
  • mandatory_topics=False: Users are not required to specify a topic when sending messages.

If you would like to change these settings, you can do so using the following process as the zulip user:

cd /home/zulip/deployments/current
./manage.py shell
from zerver.models import *
r = get_realm(settings.ADMIN_DOMAIN)
r.restricted_to_domain=False # Now anyone anywhere can login
r.save() # save to the database

If you realize you set ADMIN_DOMAIN wrong, in addition to fixing the value in settings.py, you will also want to do a similar manage.py process to set r.domain = newexample.com.

Depending what authentication backend you're planning to use, you will need to do some additional setup documented in the settings.py template:

  • For Google authentication, you need to follow the configuration instructions around GOOGLE_OAUTH2_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID.
  • For Email authentication, you will need to follow the configuration instructions around outgoing SMTP from Django.

You should be able to login now. If you get an error, check /var/log/zulip/errors.log for a traceback, and consult the next section for advice on how to debug. If you aren't able to figure it out, email [email protected] with the traceback and we'll try to help you out!

You will likely want to make your own user account an admin user, which you can do via the following management command:

./manage.py knight [email protected] -f

Now that you are an administrator, you will have a special "Administration" tab linked to from the upper-right gear menu in the Zulip app that lets you deactivate other users, manage streams, change the Realm settings you may have edited using manage.py shell above, etc.

You can also use manage.py knight with the --permission=api_super_user argument to create API super users, which are needed to mirror messages to streams from other users for the IRC and Jabber mirroring integrations (see bots/irc-mirror.py and bots/jabber_mirror.py for some detail on these).

There are a large number of useful management commands under zerver/manangement/commands/; you can also see them listed using ./manage.py with no arguments.

One such command worth highlighting because it's a valuable feature with no UI in the Administration page is ./manage.py realm_filters, which allows you to configure certain patterns in messages to be automatically linkified, e.g. whenever someone mentions "T1234" it could be auto-linkified to ticket 1234 in your team's Trac instance.

Checking Zulip is healthy and debugging the services it depends on

You can check if the zulip application is running using:

supervisorctl status

And checking for errors in the Zulip errors logs under /var/log/zulip/. That contains one log file for each service, plus errors.log (has all errors), server.log (logs from the Django and Tornado servers), and workers.log (combined logs from the queue workers).

After you change configuration in /etc/zulip/settings.py or fix a misconfiguration, you will often want to restart the Zulip application. You can restart Zulip using:

supervisorctl restart all

Similarly, you can stop Zulip using:

supervisorctl stop all

The Zulip application uses several major services to store and cache data, queue messages, and otherwise support the Zulip application:

  • postgresql
  • rabbitmq-server
  • nginx
  • redis
  • memcached

If one of these services is not installed or functioning correctly, Zulip will not work. Below we detail some common configuration problems and how to resolve them:

  • An AMQPConnectionError traceback or error running rabbitmqctl usually means that RabbitMQ is not running; to fix this, try:

    service rabbitmq-server restart

    If RabbitMQ fails to start, the problem is often that you are using a virtual machine with broken DNS configuration; you can often correct this by configuring /etc/hosts properly.

  • If your browser reports no webserver is running, that is likely because nginx is not configured properly and thus failed to start. nginx will fail to start if you configured SSL incorrectly or did not provide SSL certificates. To fix this, configure them properly and then run:

    service nginx restart

If you run into additional problems, please report them so that we can update these lists!

Making your Zulip instance awesome

Once you've got Zulip setup, you'll likely want to configure it the way you like. There are four big things to focus on:

(1) Integrations. We recommend setting up integrations for the major tools that your team works with. For example, if you're a software development team, you may want to start with integrations for your version control, issue tracker, CI system, and monitoring tools.

Spend time configuring these integrations to be how you like them -- if an integration is spammy, you may want to change it to not send messages that nobody cares about (E.g. for the zulip.com trac integration, some teams find they only want notifications when new tickets are opened, commented on, or closed, and not every time someone edits the metadata).

If Zulip doesn't have an integration you want, you can add your own! Most integrations are very easy to write, and even more complex integrations usually take less than a day's work to build. We very much appreciate contributions of new integrations; there is a brief draft integration writing guide here.

It can often be valuable to integrate your own internal processes to send notifications into Zulip; e.g. notifications of new customer signups, new error reports, or daily reports on the team's key metrics; this can often spawn discussions in response to the data.

(2) Streams and Topics. If it feels like a stream has too much traffic about a topic only of interest to some of the subscribers, consider adding or renaming streams until you feel like your team is working productively.

Second, most users are not used to topics. It can require a bit of time for everyone to get used to topics and start benefitting from them, but usually once a team is using them well, everyone ends up enthusiastic about how much topics make life easier. Some tips on using topics:

  • When replying to an existing conversation thread, just click on the message, or navigate to it with the arrow keys and hit "r" or "enter" to reply on the same topic
  • When you start a new conversation topic, even if it's related to the previous conversation, type a new topic in the compose box
  • You can edit topics to fix a thread that's already been started, which can be helpful when onboarding new batches of users to the platform.

Third, setting default streams for new users is a great way to get new users involved in conversations before they've accustomed themselves with joining streams on their own. You can use the set_default_streams command to set default streams for users within a realm:

python manage.py set_default_streams --domain=example.com --streams=foo,bar,...

(3) Notification settings. Zulip gives you a great deal of control over which messages trigger desktop notifications; you can configure these extensively in the /#settings page (get there from the gear menu). If you find the desktop notifications annoying, consider changing the settings to only trigger desktop notifications when you receive a PM or are @-mentioned.

(4) The mobile and desktop apps. Currently, the Zulip Desktop app only supports talking to servers with a properly signed SSL certificate, so you may find that you get a blank screen when you connect to a Zulip server using a self-signed certificate.

The Zulip iOS and Android apps in their respective stores don't yet support talking to non-zulip.com servers; the iOS app is waiting on Apple's app store review, while the Android app is waiting on someone to do the small project of adding a field to specify what Zulip server to talk to.

These issues will likely all be addressed in the coming weeks; make sure to join the [email protected] list so that you can receive the announcements when these become available.

(5) All the other features: Hotkeys, emoji, search filters, @-mentions, etc. Zulip has lots of great features, make sure your team knows they exist and how to use them effectively.

(6) Enjoy your Zulip installation! If you discover things that you wish had been documented, please contribute documentation suggestions either via a GitHub issue or pull request; we love even small contributions, and we'd love to make the Zulip documentation cover everything anyone might want to know about running Zulip in production.

Maintaining Zulip in production

  • To upgrade to a new version, download the appropriate release tarball from https://www.zulip.com/dist/releases/ to a path readable by the zulip user (e.g. /home/zulip), and then run as root:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/upgrade-zulip zulip-server-VERSION.tar.gz

    The upgrade process will shut down the service, run apt-get upgrade and any database migrations, and then bring the service back up. This will result in some brief downtime for the service, which should be under 30 seconds unless there is an expensive transition involved. Unless you have tested the upgrade in advance, we recommend doing upgrades at off hours.

    You can create your own release tarballs from a copy of zulip.git repository using tools/build-release-tarball.

  • To update your settings, simply edit /etc/zulip/settings.py and then run /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/restart-server to restart the server

  • You are responsible for running apt-get upgrade on your system on a regular basis to ensure that it is up to date with the latest security patches.

  • To use the Zulip API with your Zulip server, you will need to use the API endpoint of e.g. https://zulip.yourdomain.net/api. Our Python API example scripts support this via the --site=https://zulip.yourdomain.net argument. The API bindings support it via putting site=https://zulip.yourdomain.net in your .zuliprc.

    Every Zulip integration supports this sort of argument (or e.g. a ZULIP_SITE variable in a zuliprc file or the environment), but this is not yet documented for some of the integrations (the included integration documentation on /integrations will properly document how to do this for most integrations). Pull requests welcome to document this for those integrations that don't discuss this!

  • Similarly, you will need to instruct your users to specify the URL for your Zulip server when using the Zulip desktop and mobile apps.

  • As a measure to mitigate the impact of potential memory leaks in one of the Zulip daemons, the service automatically restarts itself every Sunday early morning. See /etc/cron.d/restart-zulip for the precise configuration.

SSO Authentication

Zulip supports integrating with a corporate Single-Sign-On solution. There are a few ways to do it, but this section documents how to configure Zulip to use an SSO solution that best supports Apache and will set the REMOTE_USER variable:

(0) Check that /etc/zulip/settings.py has zproject.backends.ZulipRemoteUserBackend as the only enabled value in the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS list, and that SSO_APPEND_DOMAIN is correct set depending on whether your SSO system uses email addresses or just usernames in REMOTE_USER.

Make sure that you've restarted the Zulip server since making this configuration change.

(1) Edit /etc/zulip/zulip.conf and change the puppet_classes line to read:

puppet_classes = zulip::voyager, zulip::apache_sso

(2) As root, run /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/zulip-puppet-apply to install our SSO integration.

(3) To configure our SSO integration, edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/zulip-sso.example and fill in the configuration required for your SSO service to set REMOTE_USER and place your completed configuration file at /etc/apache2/sites-available/zulip-sso

(4) Run a2ensite zulip-sso to enable the Apache integration site.

Now you should be able to visit https://zulip.yourdomain.net/ and login via the SSO solution.