7 ms·

Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

755 points by joeclef 11y ago

taesu 11y ago
is this something like slack?
- simonswords82 11y ago
  yep - very similar but with an emphasis on self hosting.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Also open source (which means it can be extended / modified / etc).
  - themodelplumber 11y ago
    Would nice if it were easier to self-host. Requiring Ubuntu 14.04 with 2GB RAM minimum...not terrible, but could point at a lot of work to be done to broaden the appeal. (Edit: And of course, a thank you to Dropbox for releasing it, this does look like a nice little setup)
    - exelius 11y ago
      Heh, in the days of VMs and containers that shouldn't be a problem. I'm sure there are already Docker containers and AWS images.
    - tabbott 11y ago
      Zulip doesn't have a strong dependency on Ubuntu 14.04. It would be less than a day's work to have it support any additional version of Debian or Ubuntu (precise/wheezy would be quite easy since we've run both in production). It's probably also not hard to support something RHEL-based too but that'd be a bit more work. RAM usage could also be brought down a lot for smaller environments with a bit of work; most of it is the fact that we run a set of like 15 queue processing workers that each import the entire application.
      - spb 11y ago
        >we run a set of like 15 queue processing workers that each import the entire application Where would one start if they were looking to disable that?
        tabbott 11y ago
        Posting this in a few places since it came up N times on this thread: I opened https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/32 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/32 to track improving the worker setup. If you're interested in helping I'm more than happy to give you a bunch of pointers for how to do it :)
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Check out: https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/ and https://zulip.org/features.html https://zulip.org/features.html. The biggest difference from something like Slack is the threading model, which is documented in some detail on those pages.
paste0x78 11y ago
2015 The year of the chat clients
- ljk 11y ago
  https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - rakoo 11y ago
    The worst part is, all those systems (we can't say clients anymore) don't even try to standardize anything. Which is understandable, because they feel like they're improving the usability situation. All they do is provide bridges to other solutions, but that's not helping on the protocol side.
- burger_moon 11y ago
  ?->building facebook clones->building twitter clones->building slack clones->? This does look like a good product though. Personally I like the style of this more than slack at first glance. Running your own server and being open source are awesome. I can't wait to see what people build on it.
  - nailer 11y ago
    Isn't Slack an IRC client with some project management features?
    - zyxley 11y ago
      No, Slack is an IRC alternative (you can connect to it with an IRC client, but you lose many of the features) with assorted bells and whistles (emoji, adding reactions to posts, easy management of private rooms, etc), a bunch of integrations with other services, and persistent and fully searchable history. That last one is really the key feature to me.
      - nailer 11y ago
tommoor 11y ago
Dropbox has great designers, surprised they couldn't have found a few hours to spruce this up in the year and a half since it was acquired :)
- robotnoises 11y ago
  My thoughts exactly. It's not awful by any stretch of the imagination, but Dropbox has traditionally set itself apart on design.
tbingmann 11y ago
Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.
  - joesmo 11y ago
    We have cross-organization Slack users in our company slack channels and I also have multiple 'organizations', so fragmentation is sometimes an issue.
    - epmatsw 11y ago
      Yep, we have a channel for developers that integrate with our product instead of having them email us. It's pretty efficient, but the fragmentation risk is there.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solution (IRC) has a lot of issues [1] which shouldn't exist in 2015. [1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToBsQ https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB...
    - 11y ago
SwellJoe 11y ago
I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them? I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our people want an alternative to email and Google Hangouts for communications, and are pushing for Slack or XMPP. I've never been a big chat user and another of our people doesn't do chat at all (so we'd likely need some kind of email gateway for him). I'm not convinced anything exists that answers all these needs, but maybe I'm just way out of the loop. Also, do any of these integrate with XMPP? Googling is inconclusive, but it seems neither connects to XMPP directly, which is unfortunate. I'd like to see an open standard backing whatever chat we choose.
- proksoup 11y ago
  I think HipChat might be the only one backing the XMPP horse still. A timeline [1]. [1] https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    Jebus. That chart is horribly depressing.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Needs to be updated. It shows Zulip died in late 2014.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    HipChat, while providing the XMPP backend, and a self-hosted option, isn't cheap, and doesn't seem to provide the extensibility that an open source option would. But, it's certainly closer to the right thing than Slack (at least, from a surface level examination). I guess it doesn't even need to be XMPP, specifically. But, some open standard and some level of interoperability would be nice. In googling I came upon matrix.org, which also seems promising, but has the same problem XMPP has of not having great clients (though I also found Kaiwa, which looks like a pretty good XMPP client with Slack-like features). Maybe one of these open source projects will formalize their protocol, and we can all move forward on interop with that.
dingdingdang 11y ago
Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..). Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size. This is a group chat. It's value is in being restricted in reach and/or size to the group (team, startup, enterprise) deploying a version of it.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. There is benefit in being able to include only a small group of people in a particular conversation, but that does not require no interoperability, only a concept of groups and permissions and access controls. In fact, it is completely orthogonal to the lack of interop.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. If something can just be locked to only talk inside the intranet/VPN it's better from something that can talk to arbitrary people the world over and is only configured not to via its own groups and permissions inside.
      - SwellJoe 11y ago
        I thought we were talking about Slack, and several other hosted services, which don't fit the description you've just given, at all. But, for a self-hosted chat service, then yes...that's a benefit.
jonathanwallace 11y ago
No plan9?!?!? I'm disappointed. :/ https://www.zulip.org/clients.html https://www.zulip.org/clients.html
- benbristow 11y ago
  Is it me or does the font on that page suck for readability?
  - jtriangle 11y ago
    nope, it's pretty bad for me too. w10 with default display everything.
  - lwf 11y ago
    Can you provide a screenshot and what browser/OS you're running? I'll look into it.
    - joonoro 11y ago
      Looks pretty bad on my end too, Firefox on Windows 7 64bit. https://i.imgur.com/AlcbVbR.png https://i.imgur.com/AlcbVbR.png
      - spike021 11y ago
        Same even with OSX, which to me is usually quite a bit easier to read.
  - 0x4a42 11y ago
    Yup, it's terrible (Firefox 42 / Windows 8.1).
    - hobarrera 11y ago
      Gathering from what I've seen on the comments, it seems to be a windows-specific issue.
BradRuderman 11y ago
Why did Dropbox build this? Why didn't they just use Slack? What were the features slack was missing or were there other business reasons?
- duskwuff 11y ago
  They didn't build it; they acquired the company that built it.
  - BradRuderman 11y ago
    Oh, I'm interested in the business decision behind that. For example why didn't they just buy (not acquire) the slack product. What were the reasons to host it in-house and manage it themselves.
    - obrajesse 11y ago
      They got the team behind it, who now work on other parts of Dropobox
      - BradRuderman 11y ago
        Right by why maintain the chat app? Why not just buy slack.
        uptown 11y ago
        GOTO 10
        egypturnash 11y ago
        Buying Slack requires Slack to be interested in selling themselves.
        npizzolato 11y ago
        You're misinterpreting him. "Buy" here is purchasing the product, as a typical customer.
Drdrdrq 11y ago
No linux client? That's a deal breaker for us right there... Pity, looks interesting otherwise.
- malisper 11y ago
  There is a web client for it.
- tabbott 11y ago
  There is a Linux client! You can build it from source right now, and prebuilt binaries will be available in a PPA soon. Prebuilt binaries aren't available quite yet because it's a lot easier to submit to a PPA once you're already open source :)
  - Drdrdrq 11y ago
    Thanks, will check it out!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Wait a week, someone will develop one.
stepmr 11y ago
Any idea why this uses a forked version of Django? I read through docs and skimmed the repo but couldn't find anything that speaks to this...
- acrefoot 11y ago
  That one is my fault. The main reason is a performance patch that we made to django, which I wasn't as diligent as I should have been in getting merged. The relevant pull request is https://github.com/django/django/pull/5166 https://github.com/django/django/pull/5166, so it will continue to be forked until I get that merged and we update our django version.
on_ 11y ago
Smart play. If they can lock people in to their free chat client they can get a stronger foothold into enterprise and servicing smaller start-up/SMB companies. This is what Paul Graham talks about building an e-mail client, just call it a todo list. This is a storage application front-end. Slack and hipchat charge the money for secure storage, file transfer and data. That is Dropbox's competitive advantage and a great way to break into the market discreetly. Client looks cool, I will be downloading it.
- eric-hu 11y ago
  For others who didn't get the PG reference: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
  - on_ 11y ago
    Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it. Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is "Bring Back the Old More's Law", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a "sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious. [0]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s [1]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s
    - sitkack 11y ago
      "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" refers to something which has been hand waved away as a "Simple Matter of Engineering" or an "Exercise for the Reader" as to be impossibly difficult. Compilers are already very smart, usually the sufficient part of the SSC is a tongue in cheek Spock like sufficient. See the failure of Itanium betting that it could produce the SSC to create fast code. It was never built, the performance never matched expectations and it failed.
gregwtmtno 11y ago
For those wondering, it's Apache license.
misiti3780 11y ago
looks like a great codebase, both django and ios!
bachmeier 11y ago
Looks wonderful, but am I the only one that thinks the recommended 4 GB server is a lot?
- tabbott 11y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246.
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    Okay, then given that it's open source, hopefully we'll see a smaller version soon.
    - kevinr 11y ago
      Just don't make the mistake I did of running with less than 4 GB and then having a flash crowd show up. You really want the RAM for acceptable performance with a reasonable number of concurrent users.
- tabbott 11y ago
  Posting this in a few places since it came up N times on this thread: I opened https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/34 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/34 to track optimizing the server-side memory consumption. :)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mahouse 11y ago
Someone should tell those web developers choosing those fonts that not everybody has a damn Mac. https://i.imgur.com/MciirNR.png https://i.imgur.com/MciirNR.png
- tabbott 11y ago
  It looks a lot better on my Linux laptop! We're investigating.
  - mahouse 11y ago
    I have found bugs on that installation guide. For example it tells you to install the certificate chain to /etc/ssl/certs/zulip.combined-chain.crt But nginx looks for it in /etc/ssl/certs/zulip-combined-chain.crt Also during your installation you download this deb file to /root/zulip/python-django-guardian_1.3-1~zulip4_all.deb But the script then tries to install it from /root/python-django-guardian_1.3-1~zulip4_all.deb`
    - tabbott 11y ago
      Thanks for reporting! Both of those are already fixed in the latest tarball on the website.
tracker1 11y ago
I'm curious on the separate uses of Redis, RabbitMQ and Memcached... it seems these uses could all just use Redis. And have a lower overall memory/cpu footprint to boot.
- tabbott 11y ago
  Zulip use RabbitMQ for passing messages where persistence is desired; last I checked Redis didn't support persistent on-disk queues. Zulip's use of redis right now is basically just for the API rate-limiting; it could be easily removed.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Redis does have persistence options... I was just thinking Redis is often used as a more advanced memcached, while also supporting pub/sub channels and acting as a mq broker with a frontend... was just thinking in terms of reducing the requisite services, since rabbitmq requires erlang and it's own services as well as memcached. http://redis.io/topics/persistence http://redis.io/topics/persistence http://python-rq.org/ http://python-rq.org/
    - tabbott 11y ago
      OK, well, I'd certainly be happy to review a plan to consolidate things (probably the development mailing list is a better place for a detailed discussion) that doesn't hurt performance.
    - latch 11y ago
      In fairness, your parent introduced the word "persistence" to this discussion, but I think you're misunderstanding queues if you think the two are interchangeable. Two things you often want are at-least-once delivery and the ability to queue messages without requiring the consumer to be connected. It requires a fair amount of work to get this to work in Redis. It's not simple configuration.
      - tracker1 11y ago
mnx 11y ago
The 'Or use the web app' link on the frontpage links to the list of desktop clients instead of the web app.
- tabbott 11y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out! Will fix.
nornagon 11y ago
Reminds me of https://euphoria.io https://euphoria.io
mansilladev 11y ago
So, if you're going to tool around, and think, "Hey, I've got an Ubuntu/Debian box laying around" -- you best just follow the repo README advice and do this on a virtual box. The server install scripts have some heavy dependencies (puppet, django), if the "sudo -i" wasn't a clue enough. Also, if you are doing this, /root/zulip/scripts/lib/install's wgets need some "--no-check-certificate" flags. When I get zulip server stood up I'll post my IP.
- tabbott 11y ago
  Yeah I'm hoping that the community will do some work on simplifying this -- our focus on the installation process side was to make there be at least one installation process for the two use cases that works completely automatically. FWIW at Zulip we usually did our development environment on our laptop not inside a VM; it's not that hard to do, but the nice thing about the Vagrant setup (written as part of the Hack Week project) is that it's for people with no familiarity with the software to get to a running environment. It should be feasible to make a Debian package for it that plays nicely; as you can see most of the dependencies are already packaged. Everything scripts/lib/install downloads via https has a valid cert; I suspect the issue may be that we should bundle the verification chain. I'd love to see notes on whatever issues you encounter in a github issue or sent to the mailing list so we can make things smoother.
kirmerzlikin 11y ago
cool
jayzalowitz 11y ago
#googlewave
ctingom 11y ago
No mention of Skype? It seems like every one of my business contacts is using Skype to chat.
dang 11y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279743 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280146.
sinak 11y ago
My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server? I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted instances of open source projects.
- tabbott 11y ago
  I think there are two approaches one could take for doing this: * It seems like one way you could make that possible would be to make it really easy to do white-label builds of the Zulip mobile apps. E.g. the "Zulip for example.com" app. Would be more overhead than is ideal for smaller deployments. * It should be possible to have APNS/GCM traffic go through a central community-hosted service that dispatches the messages on to a set of configured Zulip servers. We actually had functionality based on a similar concept for the Zulip desktop app login process, where it would query a service on zulip.com with e.g. "example.com" and that would return the URL of what zulip server hosts example.com, so that users don't need to fill that out in the login process. For the open source release, we replaced this with in an explicit "what server are you doing prompt" but it would certainly be technically possible to go this route.
  - sinak 11y ago
    Hey tabbott, I'd love to chat about this more if you're interested, it's something we've been particularly looking for. My email is sina@eff.org. White-label builds of Zulip apps would work, but at least in our case wouldn't be ideal. Having a central community-hosted service would be much better.
    - tabbott 11y ago
      Sounds good, pinged you off-thread.
krig 11y ago
"You can install a Zulip server on a system with 2G of RAM, but for production use we recommend a system with 4GB of RAM or more." Something has gone horribly wrong when a chat server can barely run on 2G. edit: As a frame of reference, here's what Inspire IRCd needs: > A network with 3000-4000 locally connected clients and 10000 open channels experiences a constant 1-4% CPU use with 70MB of RAM use. This won't go up drastically, but it will go up. Around 40000 local clients means you'll be expecting some 500MB of RAM. [1] [1]: http://www.inspircd.org/wiki/FAQ.html http://www.inspircd.org/wiki/FAQ.html
- tabbott 11y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246. Historically most users were using the single cloud installation at zulip.com, and so having this significant fixed memory overhead wasn't a problem. I expect someone will do the work the fix this before long; it shouldn't be hard.
  - krig 11y ago
    Thanks for the explanation! I take it that the open sourced zulip is very close to what zulip.com runs, then?
    - tabbott 11y ago
      Yes, it's in fact exactly what's running on zulip.com. puppet/zulip_internal in the server repo even has the zulip.com puppet configuration (sans secrets).
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  Who cares though? A 4 GiB stick of ECC server RAM is $35-50, which is only about $10 more expensive than a 2 GiB stick. If you spent even twenty minutes of developer time trying to reduce memory usage, you've already lost money. It may still be worth the total savings if someone solves it globally, but from the perspective of an individual company who wants to run this, it doesn't matter at all.
- 11y ago
zobzu 11y ago
It looks cool that said as usual its "hey I dont like <insert some chat program> so im just going to code my own incompatible one". In the end im happy with IRC. Its not the greatest but its the one that just works: Its the one everyone who's an engineer in the business knows how to use, bots work, automation work, and irccloud works if you like webuis.
manigandham 11y ago
Side note: Please STOP using tiny font weights. Text becomes ridiculously hard/painful to read. There's no reason to use a font-weight of 200 (or anything less than 500) on body text, save that for the headlines. http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png
- thought_alarm 11y ago
  I'd be curious to see how the screenshot below looks on your system. http://i.imgur.com/xCWBCcB.png http://i.imgur.com/xCWBCcB.png
  - manigandham 11y ago
    I'm not sure what you're asking here... that text looks fine but it's also much larger than mine. Are you on a 4k/retina/high DPI monitor? I'm viewing on a 1900x1200 24"
- mikekchar 11y ago
  There is something wrong with your rendering. What system are you using? It looks to me like the hinting and/or sub-pixel rendering is wrong. I had a lot of problems with this when I moved to Arch Linux because Debian had done some default setup that I needed to figure out in Arch. Here are my xresources for xft if you are using Linux (probably formatted badly, but you can get an idea): Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.rgba: rgb Xft.dpi: 96 It will give you a place to start, anyway. Main things you will want to change are the rgba and dpi depending on your monitor. The filter and hintstyle depends on your preference. Just make sure to turn autohinting off. If you are using something else, then I'm not sure how to fix it, but I can tell you for certain that it is broken ;-)
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    Enough other people (who can read other websites perfectly fine) are complaining about breakage that it's pretty clear this site is doing something wrong. "You had one job ..." applies here. Body text on a webpage should be readable on all platforms.
kevinr 11y ago
We've been using Zulip internally for a couple of years now. We've used IRC and Jabber, looked at Slack and Hipchat and Skype and Lync, and somehow keep coming back to Zulip. It lets us have real, ongoing, and substantive conversations, with a large number of participants, without being overwhelmed. I sometimes feel like Twitter is actually a better comparison for Zulip than Slack---in Zulip like on Twitter, it's easy to watch and participate in multiple conversations at the same time. Zulip's threading model exists somewhere between Slack's rigid "rooms" model and Twitter's everything-is-public model, so it's much lighter-weight to participate in multiple places at once than on Slack but it's also easier than on Twitter to have the right conversation with the right people without bothering others with something irrelevant to them. And Zulip's threading model makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space without stepping on each others' toes or getting distracted. Our remote folks rely on it particularly heavily. When Zulip got acquired it was our remote employees and their managers who were showing up outside my cube with pitchforks when I breathed a word of turning it off. It gives folks in other offices or working from home a watercooler and a way to virtually tap a group of coworkers lightly on the shoulder when they need help. Basically we can't live without it, so I'm super-excited to see it finally open sourced. Thanks for making it happen. :-)
- sytse 11y ago
  So Zulip was acquired in March 2014 http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-st... You mention considering to turn it off. Is open sourcing it a way to keep the project going? Any idea how many people at Dropbox will be tasked with maintaining it?
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Just to clarify, most users of Zulip were using the central cloud service (zulip.com). Kevin's experience is from one of the Zulip customers who had "Zulip Enterprise" (aka a Zulip server in their own data center -- which is also the basis of the "self-hosted production server" installation process you see now is based on). So "turning it off" in this case refers to their discussions about their internal deployment, not the Zulip cloud service (which is still running for existing Zulip users today). I think my blog post covers pretty well why we open sourced Zulip: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a....
muyuu 11y ago
"The Zulip desktop app is a C++ application written with the Qt toolkit. It is a lightweight wrapper around a Webkit web view: it loads the zulip webapp as a single page full-screen webpage. The desktop app provides some native integrations: tray icon and Dock support, notifications, and more." Wouldn't it be better if the multi-platform wrapper for Webkit web view was a separate project? Should be useful, if it doesn't exist already.
- acrefoot 11y ago
  I believe that Atom Shell/Electron fills that use case today. I think when the Zulip Desktop app was started that Atom shell wasn't available or maybe not quite good enough.
mrmondo 11y ago
Good to see it be open sourced. I'm disappointed there's no XMPP gateway, OTR chat encryption or Gitlab integration however.
- tabbott 11y ago
  There's a Git integration that you can use with GitLab or anything else that supports post-receive hooks. But it would be cool if someone contributed a more slick GitLab integration :) Also there is a beta XMPP gateway at bots/jabber_mirror.py that can mirror traffic with an XMPP setup. It's beta because it's kinda annoying to setup; feel free to reach out on the development list for help if you have issues setting it up. One note is that the a key feature of Zulip is thread-level topics which aren't really supported by XMPP; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280817 for more discussion of this.
  - mrmondo 11y ago
    Ah good to know - thanks for the info. I just spotted this though: "Currently, the automated Zulip server installation process only supports Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty" Not at all keen to run Ubuntu, if it was available on CentOS 7 or Debian I'd give it a go but I guess I'll hold off for now.
    - tabbott 11y ago
      Yeah we run Debian Wheezy in production, so it's definitely possible, just I don't have a nice automated install process handy -- there's a thread about it here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zulip-devel/8iz25Ad-Kiw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zulip-devel/8iz25Ad-...
  - tabbott 11y ago
    https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/33 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/33 is open for adding a slick GitLab integration
lisianne 11y ago
Wow. Great news. Very good alternative to slack.
ausjke 11y ago
indeed a great move, the part I don't get is that why dropbox acquired it then opensource it? what's the logic behind this...
- tkinom 11y ago
  I have the same questions too. Acquihire? Also, how is zulip compare to slack in term of features, stability, pro/con? I tried search youtube for any zulip demo/screencast, can't find anything - very strange.
jnpatel 11y ago
I haven't yet tried Zulip's threading model, but I can certainly say I'm not pleased with Slack's. It can be very frustrating to try and trace a conversation backwards in a crowded Slack channel. I haven't used IRC in a while, but at least my client had a feature to toggle highlighting on a back-and-forth conversation, but that wasn't perfect.
cdixon 11y ago
Commoditize the complement: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
aikah 11y ago
Nice, it looks like an excellent Django app to study.
- tabbott 11y ago
  If you're looking for interesting elements, the REQ framework for doing argument validation I'm pretty happy with and have been thinking would be good to try to extend to be part of Django upstream.
e12e 11y ago
A couple of Zulip questions: 1) Is there any support for federation? At first glance it looks like every installation might have multiple servers, but more for balancing load, than federation? 2) How well is the protocol specified? How hard would it be to par down the requirements to eg: just python and sqlite/lmdb or redis (or zodb...)? Say if one wants to support just ~100 users or so?
- tabbott 11y ago
  (1) Not currently, though you can certainly imagine doing it and having it work well; the core data model doesn't change very much over time. (2) There's a reasonably well-specific API, and you could imagine building an independent implementation that fit that API and feeling good about doing so. But I feel like that would probably be a lot of work and you could probably much more easier achieve whatever your actual goal without paring down the dependencies very much. E.g. the relatively high minimum recommended RAM for a Zulip server is mostly due to running 20 Python processes for all the queue workers, most of which are idle all the time. If we wanted to decrease the memory requirements, there's a variety of ways to solve that problem directly that are a lot easier than doing a rewrite :).
orliesaurus 11y ago
No one mentioned gitter.im, weird...
pjtr 11y ago
What do Zulip / Slack / Hipchat / IRC / ... people do for screensharing and (group) voice calls? We'd love the chat improvements, but without screensharing and voice we're stuck on Skype. :(
- loosescrews 11y ago
  There is also Chromebox for Meetings[1]: https://www.google.com/work/chrome/devices/for-meetings/ https://www.google.com/work/chrome/devices/for-meetings/
- gglanzani 11y ago
  Hipchat does screensharing and voice/video (although not yet group).
- eeZi 11y ago
  https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
benwilber0 11y ago
who cares. seriously. group chat is a solved problem.
relaxitup 11y ago
LDAP support?
- lwf 11y ago
  We have an authentication backend for that: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f3aa7200c14e7c626/zproject/backends.py#L130 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f...
vegabook 11y ago
Is it possible to have secure chats that the server cannot read?
mapletune 11y ago
Does anyone know if Zulip has support for directory integration? whether it's OpenLDAP or MS AD. Hell, even RADIUS would be ok by me... @@
- lwf 11y ago
  LDAP is supported: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f3aa7200c14e7c626/zproject/backends.py#L130 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f... Also, generic webserver-side REMOTE_USER authentication is supported.
  - mapletune 11y ago
    thanks~! Going to try it out then =p
alkonaut 11y ago
Has anyone switched workplace chat from skype to something else? I don't much like the chat bits in Skype but on the other hand the voice bit is fantastic. I can't imagine having to manage two separate contact lists for chat and voice, so I'm reluctant to switch to something that doesn't have good voice or integrates with something that has (e.g. launch group call from a chat conversation).
moreorless 11y ago
Those bastards!! Got me all excited with the Plan 9 tease. ;(
darkarmani 11y ago
Wow. Good luck installing this. I'm not touching it. It needs to do all sorts of hokey things to work. It needs puppet and git to work? You can't just install python packages, it installs them from a ppa. Deployment is a huge mess. It doesn't have to be this hard.
- lwf 11y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. We prioritised getting this into a state where it can run in dev and production based on the existing deployment processes we used in our own environment. I'm working on a Debian package[1], and we expect to iterate on the deployment process in general. 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800052 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800052
reeboblue 11y ago
Anyone have recommendations for a free SSL cert provider so that I can test this out?

755 points by joeclef 11y ago

taesu 11y ago

is this something like slack?

simonswords82 11y ago
yep - very similar but with an emphasis on self hosting.
- exelius 11y ago
  Also open source (which means it can be extended / modified / etc).
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  Would nice if it were easier to self-host. Requiring Ubuntu 14.04 with 2GB RAM minimum...not terrible, but could point at a lot of work to be done to broaden the appeal. (Edit: And of course, a thank you to Dropbox for releasing it, this does look like a nice little setup)
  - exelius 11y ago
    Heh, in the days of VMs and containers that shouldn't be a problem. I'm sure there are already Docker containers and AWS images.
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Zulip doesn't have a strong dependency on Ubuntu 14.04. It would be less than a day's work to have it support any additional version of Debian or Ubuntu (precise/wheezy would be quite easy since we've run both in production). It's probably also not hard to support something RHEL-based too but that'd be a bit more work. RAM usage could also be brought down a lot for smaller environments with a bit of work; most of it is the fact that we run a set of like 15 queue processing workers that each import the entire application.
    - spb 11y ago
      >we run a set of like 15 queue processing workers that each import the entire application Where would one start if they were looking to disable that?
      - tabbott 11y ago
        Posting this in a few places since it came up N times on this thread: I opened https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/32 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/32 to track improving the worker setup. If you're interested in helping I'm more than happy to give you a bunch of pointers for how to do it :)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- tabbott 11y ago
  Check out: https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/ and https://zulip.org/features.html https://zulip.org/features.html. The biggest difference from something like Slack is the threading model, which is documented in some detail on those pages.

paste0x78 11y ago

2015 The year of the chat clients

ljk 11y ago
https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- rakoo 11y ago
  The worst part is, all those systems (we can't say clients anymore) don't even try to standardize anything. Which is understandable, because they feel like they're improving the usability situation. All they do is provide bridges to other solutions, but that's not helping on the protocol side.
burger_moon 11y ago
?->building facebook clones->building twitter clones->building slack clones->? This does look like a good product though. Personally I like the style of this more than slack at first glance. Running your own server and being open source are awesome. I can't wait to see what people build on it.
- nailer 11y ago
  Isn't Slack an IRC client with some project management features?
  - zyxley 11y ago
    No, Slack is an IRC alternative (you can connect to it with an IRC client, but you lose many of the features) with assorted bells and whistles (emoji, adding reactions to posts, easy management of private rooms, etc), a bunch of integrations with other services, and persistent and fully searchable history. That last one is really the key feature to me.
    - nailer 11y ago

tommoor 11y ago

Dropbox has great designers, surprised they couldn't have found a few hours to spruce this up in the year and a half since it was acquired :)

robotnoises 11y ago
My thoughts exactly. It's not awful by any stretch of the imagination, but Dropbox has traditionally set itself apart on design.

tbingmann 11y ago

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

coldtea 11y ago
Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.
- joesmo 11y ago
  We have cross-organization Slack users in our company slack channels and I also have multiple 'organizations', so fragmentation is sometimes an issue.
  - epmatsw 11y ago
    Yep, we have a channel for developers that integrate with our product instead of having them email us. It's pretty efficient, but the fragmentation risk is there.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solution (IRC) has a lot of issues [1] which shouldn't exist in 2015. [1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToBsQ https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB...
  - 11y ago

SwellJoe 11y ago

I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them? I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our people want an alternative to email and Google Hangouts for communications, and are pushing for Slack or XMPP. I've never been a big chat user and another of our people doesn't do chat at all (so we'd likely need some kind of email gateway for him). I'm not convinced anything exists that answers all these needs, but maybe I'm just way out of the loop. Also, do any of these integrate with XMPP? Googling is inconclusive, but it seems neither connects to XMPP directly, which is unfortunate. I'd like to see an open standard backing whatever chat we choose.

proksoup 11y ago
I think HipChat might be the only one backing the XMPP horse still. A timeline [1]. [1] https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Jebus. That chart is horribly depressing.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Needs to be updated. It shows Zulip died in late 2014.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  HipChat, while providing the XMPP backend, and a self-hosted option, isn't cheap, and doesn't seem to provide the extensibility that an open source option would. But, it's certainly closer to the right thing than Slack (at least, from a surface level examination). I guess it doesn't even need to be XMPP, specifically. But, some open standard and some level of interoperability would be nice. In googling I came upon matrix.org, which also seems promising, but has the same problem XMPP has of not having great clients (though I also found Kaiwa, which looks like a pretty good XMPP client with Slack-like features). Maybe one of these open source projects will formalize their protocol, and we can all move forward on interop with that.

dingdingdang 11y ago

Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..). Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.

coldtea 11y ago
>Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size. This is a group chat. It's value is in being restricted in reach and/or size to the group (team, startup, enterprise) deploying a version of it.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. There is benefit in being able to include only a small group of people in a particular conversation, but that does not require no interoperability, only a concept of groups and permissions and access controls. In fact, it is completely orthogonal to the lack of interop.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. If something can just be locked to only talk inside the intranet/VPN it's better from something that can talk to arbitrary people the world over and is only configured not to via its own groups and permissions inside.
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      I thought we were talking about Slack, and several other hosted services, which don't fit the description you've just given, at all. But, for a self-hosted chat service, then yes...that's a benefit.

jonathanwallace 11y ago

No plan9?!?!? I'm disappointed. :/ https://www.zulip.org/clients.html https://www.zulip.org/clients.html

benbristow 11y ago
Is it me or does the font on that page suck for readability?
- jtriangle 11y ago
  nope, it's pretty bad for me too. w10 with default display everything.
- lwf 11y ago
  Can you provide a screenshot and what browser/OS you're running? I'll look into it.
  - joonoro 11y ago
    Looks pretty bad on my end too, Firefox on Windows 7 64bit. https://i.imgur.com/AlcbVbR.png https://i.imgur.com/AlcbVbR.png
    - spike021 11y ago
      Same even with OSX, which to me is usually quite a bit easier to read.
- 0x4a42 11y ago
  Yup, it's terrible (Firefox 42 / Windows 8.1).
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    Gathering from what I've seen on the comments, it seems to be a windows-specific issue.

BradRuderman 11y ago

Why did Dropbox build this? Why didn't they just use Slack? What were the features slack was missing or were there other business reasons?

duskwuff 11y ago
They didn't build it; they acquired the company that built it.
- BradRuderman 11y ago
  Oh, I'm interested in the business decision behind that. For example why didn't they just buy (not acquire) the slack product. What were the reasons to host it in-house and manage it themselves.
  - obrajesse 11y ago
    They got the team behind it, who now work on other parts of Dropobox
    - BradRuderman 11y ago
      Right by why maintain the chat app? Why not just buy slack.
      - uptown 11y ago
        GOTO 10
      - egypturnash 11y ago
        Buying Slack requires Slack to be interested in selling themselves.
        npizzolato 11y ago
        You're misinterpreting him. "Buy" here is purchasing the product, as a typical customer.

Drdrdrq 11y ago

No linux client? That's a deal breaker for us right there... Pity, looks interesting otherwise.

malisper 11y ago
There is a web client for it.
tabbott 11y ago
There is a Linux client! You can build it from source right now, and prebuilt binaries will be available in a PPA soon. Prebuilt binaries aren't available quite yet because it's a lot easier to submit to a PPA once you're already open source :)
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  Thanks, will check it out!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Wait a week, someone will develop one.

stepmr 11y ago

Any idea why this uses a forked version of Django? I read through docs and skimmed the repo but couldn't find anything that speaks to this...

acrefoot 11y ago
That one is my fault. The main reason is a performance patch that we made to django, which I wasn't as diligent as I should have been in getting merged. The relevant pull request is https://github.com/django/django/pull/5166 https://github.com/django/django/pull/5166, so it will continue to be forked until I get that merged and we update our django version.

on_ 11y ago

Smart play. If they can lock people in to their free chat client they can get a stronger foothold into enterprise and servicing smaller start-up/SMB companies. This is what Paul Graham talks about building an e-mail client, just call it a todo list. This is a storage application front-end. Slack and hipchat charge the money for secure storage, file transfer and data. That is Dropbox's competitive advantage and a great way to break into the market discreetly. Client looks cool, I will be downloading it.

eric-hu 11y ago
For others who didn't get the PG reference: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- on_ 11y ago
  Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it. Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is "Bring Back the Old More's Law", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a "sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious. [0]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s [1]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s
  - sitkack 11y ago
    "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" refers to something which has been hand waved away as a "Simple Matter of Engineering" or an "Exercise for the Reader" as to be impossibly difficult. Compilers are already very smart, usually the sufficient part of the SSC is a tongue in cheek Spock like sufficient. See the failure of Itanium betting that it could produce the SSC to create fast code. It was never built, the performance never matched expectations and it failed.

gregwtmtno 11y ago

For those wondering, it's Apache license.

misiti3780 11y ago

looks like a great codebase, both django and ios!

bachmeier 11y ago

Looks wonderful, but am I the only one that thinks the recommended 4 GB server is a lot?

tabbott 11y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  Okay, then given that it's open source, hopefully we'll see a smaller version soon.
  - kevinr 11y ago
    Just don't make the mistake I did of running with less than 4 GB and then having a flash crowd show up. You really want the RAM for acceptable performance with a reasonable number of concurrent users.
tabbott 11y ago
Posting this in a few places since it came up N times on this thread: I opened https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/34 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/34 to track optimizing the server-side memory consumption. :)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mahouse 11y ago

Someone should tell those web developers choosing those fonts that not everybody has a damn Mac. https://i.imgur.com/MciirNR.png https://i.imgur.com/MciirNR.png

tabbott 11y ago
It looks a lot better on my Linux laptop! We're investigating.
- mahouse 11y ago
  I have found bugs on that installation guide. For example it tells you to install the certificate chain to /etc/ssl/certs/zulip.combined-chain.crt But nginx looks for it in /etc/ssl/certs/zulip-combined-chain.crt Also during your installation you download this deb file to /root/zulip/python-django-guardian_1.3-1~zulip4_all.deb But the script then tries to install it from /root/python-django-guardian_1.3-1~zulip4_all.deb`
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Thanks for reporting! Both of those are already fixed in the latest tarball on the website.

tracker1 11y ago

I'm curious on the separate uses of Redis, RabbitMQ and Memcached... it seems these uses could all just use Redis. And have a lower overall memory/cpu footprint to boot.

tabbott 11y ago
Zulip use RabbitMQ for passing messages where persistence is desired; last I checked Redis didn't support persistent on-disk queues. Zulip's use of redis right now is basically just for the API rate-limiting; it could be easily removed.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Redis does have persistence options... I was just thinking Redis is often used as a more advanced memcached, while also supporting pub/sub channels and acting as a mq broker with a frontend... was just thinking in terms of reducing the requisite services, since rabbitmq requires erlang and it's own services as well as memcached. http://redis.io/topics/persistence http://redis.io/topics/persistence http://python-rq.org/ http://python-rq.org/
  - tabbott 11y ago
    OK, well, I'd certainly be happy to review a plan to consolidate things (probably the development mailing list is a better place for a detailed discussion) that doesn't hurt performance.
  - latch 11y ago
    In fairness, your parent introduced the word "persistence" to this discussion, but I think you're misunderstanding queues if you think the two are interchangeable. Two things you often want are at-least-once delivery and the ability to queue messages without requiring the consumer to be connected. It requires a fair amount of work to get this to work in Redis. It's not simple configuration.
    - tracker1 11y ago

mnx 11y ago

The 'Or use the web app' link on the frontpage links to the list of desktop clients instead of the web app.

tabbott 11y ago
Thanks for pointing this out! Will fix.

nornagon 11y ago

Reminds me of https://euphoria.io https://euphoria.io

mansilladev 11y ago

So, if you're going to tool around, and think, "Hey, I've got an Ubuntu/Debian box laying around" -- you best just follow the repo README advice and do this on a virtual box. The server install scripts have some heavy dependencies (puppet, django), if the "sudo -i" wasn't a clue enough. Also, if you are doing this, /root/zulip/scripts/lib/install's wgets need some "--no-check-certificate" flags. When I get zulip server stood up I'll post my IP.

tabbott 11y ago
Yeah I'm hoping that the community will do some work on simplifying this -- our focus on the installation process side was to make there be at least one installation process for the two use cases that works completely automatically. FWIW at Zulip we usually did our development environment on our laptop not inside a VM; it's not that hard to do, but the nice thing about the Vagrant setup (written as part of the Hack Week project) is that it's for people with no familiarity with the software to get to a running environment. It should be feasible to make a Debian package for it that plays nicely; as you can see most of the dependencies are already packaged. Everything scripts/lib/install downloads via https has a valid cert; I suspect the issue may be that we should bundle the verification chain. I'd love to see notes on whatever issues you encounter in a github issue or sent to the mailing list so we can make things smoother.

kirmerzlikin 11y ago

cool

jayzalowitz 11y ago

#googlewave

ctingom 11y ago

No mention of Skype? It seems like every one of my business contacts is using Skype to chat.

dang 11y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279743 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280146.

sinak 11y ago

My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server? I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted instances of open source projects.

tabbott 11y ago
I think there are two approaches one could take for doing this: * It seems like one way you could make that possible would be to make it really easy to do white-label builds of the Zulip mobile apps. E.g. the "Zulip for example.com" app. Would be more overhead than is ideal for smaller deployments. * It should be possible to have APNS/GCM traffic go through a central community-hosted service that dispatches the messages on to a set of configured Zulip servers. We actually had functionality based on a similar concept for the Zulip desktop app login process, where it would query a service on zulip.com with e.g. "example.com" and that would return the URL of what zulip server hosts example.com, so that users don't need to fill that out in the login process. For the open source release, we replaced this with in an explicit "what server are you doing prompt" but it would certainly be technically possible to go this route.
- sinak 11y ago
  Hey tabbott, I'd love to chat about this more if you're interested, it's something we've been particularly looking for. My email is sina@eff.org. White-label builds of Zulip apps would work, but at least in our case wouldn't be ideal. Having a central community-hosted service would be much better.
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Sounds good, pinged you off-thread.

krig 11y ago

"You can install a Zulip server on a system with 2G of RAM, but for production use we recommend a system with 4GB of RAM or more." Something has gone horribly wrong when a chat server can barely run on 2G. edit: As a frame of reference, here's what Inspire IRCd needs: > A network with 3000-4000 locally connected clients and 10000 open channels experiences a constant 1-4% CPU use with 70MB of RAM use. This won't go up drastically, but it will go up. Around 40000 local clients means you'll be expecting some 500MB of RAM. [1] [1]: http://www.inspircd.org/wiki/FAQ.html http://www.inspircd.org/wiki/FAQ.html

tabbott 11y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280246. Historically most users were using the single cloud installation at zulip.com, and so having this significant fixed memory overhead wasn't a problem. I expect someone will do the work the fix this before long; it shouldn't be hard.
- krig 11y ago
  Thanks for the explanation! I take it that the open sourced zulip is very close to what zulip.com runs, then?
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Yes, it's in fact exactly what's running on zulip.com. puppet/zulip_internal in the server repo even has the zulip.com puppet configuration (sans secrets).
CydeWeys 11y ago
Who cares though? A 4 GiB stick of ECC server RAM is $35-50, which is only about $10 more expensive than a 2 GiB stick. If you spent even twenty minutes of developer time trying to reduce memory usage, you've already lost money. It may still be worth the total savings if someone solves it globally, but from the perspective of an individual company who wants to run this, it doesn't matter at all.
11y ago

zobzu 11y ago

It looks cool that said as usual its "hey I dont like <insert some chat program> so im just going to code my own incompatible one". In the end im happy with IRC. Its not the greatest but its the one that just works: Its the one everyone who's an engineer in the business knows how to use, bots work, automation work, and irccloud works if you like webuis.

manigandham 11y ago

Side note: Please STOP using tiny font weights. Text becomes ridiculously hard/painful to read. There's no reason to use a font-weight of 200 (or anything less than 500) on body text, save that for the headlines. http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png

thought_alarm 11y ago
I'd be curious to see how the screenshot below looks on your system. http://i.imgur.com/xCWBCcB.png http://i.imgur.com/xCWBCcB.png
- manigandham 11y ago
  I'm not sure what you're asking here... that text looks fine but it's also much larger than mine. Are you on a 4k/retina/high DPI monitor? I'm viewing on a 1900x1200 24"
mikekchar 11y ago
There is something wrong with your rendering. What system are you using? It looks to me like the hinting and/or sub-pixel rendering is wrong. I had a lot of problems with this when I moved to Arch Linux because Debian had done some default setup that I needed to figure out in Arch. Here are my xresources for xft if you are using Linux (probably formatted badly, but you can get an idea): Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.rgba: rgb Xft.dpi: 96 It will give you a place to start, anyway. Main things you will want to change are the rgba and dpi depending on your monitor. The filter and hintstyle depends on your preference. Just make sure to turn autohinting off. If you are using something else, then I'm not sure how to fix it, but I can tell you for certain that it is broken ;-)
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  Enough other people (who can read other websites perfectly fine) are complaining about breakage that it's pretty clear this site is doing something wrong. "You had one job ..." applies here. Body text on a webpage should be readable on all platforms.

kevinr 11y ago

We've been using Zulip internally for a couple of years now. We've used IRC and Jabber, looked at Slack and Hipchat and Skype and Lync, and somehow keep coming back to Zulip. It lets us have real, ongoing, and substantive conversations, with a large number of participants, without being overwhelmed. I sometimes feel like Twitter is actually a better comparison for Zulip than Slack---in Zulip like on Twitter, it's easy to watch and participate in multiple conversations at the same time. Zulip's threading model exists somewhere between Slack's rigid "rooms" model and Twitter's everything-is-public model, so it's much lighter-weight to participate in multiple places at once than on Slack but it's also easier than on Twitter to have the right conversation with the right people without bothering others with something irrelevant to them. And Zulip's threading model makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space without stepping on each others' toes or getting distracted. Our remote folks rely on it particularly heavily. When Zulip got acquired it was our remote employees and their managers who were showing up outside my cube with pitchforks when I breathed a word of turning it off. It gives folks in other offices or working from home a watercooler and a way to virtually tap a group of coworkers lightly on the shoulder when they need help. Basically we can't live without it, so I'm super-excited to see it finally open sourced. Thanks for making it happen. :-)

sytse 11y ago
So Zulip was acquired in March 2014 http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-st... You mention considering to turn it off. Is open sourcing it a way to keep the project going? Any idea how many people at Dropbox will be tasked with maintaining it?
- tabbott 11y ago
  Just to clarify, most users of Zulip were using the central cloud service (zulip.com). Kevin's experience is from one of the Zulip customers who had "Zulip Enterprise" (aka a Zulip server in their own data center -- which is also the basis of the "self-hosted production server" installation process you see now is based on). So "turning it off" in this case refers to their discussions about their internal deployment, not the Zulip cloud service (which is still running for existing Zulip users today). I think my blog post covers pretty well why we open sourced Zulip: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a....

muyuu 11y ago

"The Zulip desktop app is a C++ application written with the Qt toolkit. It is a lightweight wrapper around a Webkit web view: it loads the zulip webapp as a single page full-screen webpage. The desktop app provides some native integrations: tray icon and Dock support, notifications, and more." Wouldn't it be better if the multi-platform wrapper for Webkit web view was a separate project? Should be useful, if it doesn't exist already.

acrefoot 11y ago
I believe that Atom Shell/Electron fills that use case today. I think when the Zulip Desktop app was started that Atom shell wasn't available or maybe not quite good enough.

mrmondo 11y ago

Good to see it be open sourced. I'm disappointed there's no XMPP gateway, OTR chat encryption or Gitlab integration however.

tabbott 11y ago
There's a Git integration that you can use with GitLab or anything else that supports post-receive hooks. But it would be cool if someone contributed a more slick GitLab integration :) Also there is a beta XMPP gateway at bots/jabber_mirror.py that can mirror traffic with an XMPP setup. It's beta because it's kinda annoying to setup; feel free to reach out on the development list for help if you have issues setting it up. One note is that the a key feature of Zulip is thread-level topics which aren't really supported by XMPP; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280817 for more discussion of this.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Ah good to know - thanks for the info. I just spotted this though: "Currently, the automated Zulip server installation process only supports Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty" Not at all keen to run Ubuntu, if it was available on CentOS 7 or Debian I'd give it a go but I guess I'll hold off for now.
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Yeah we run Debian Wheezy in production, so it's definitely possible, just I don't have a nice automated install process handy -- there's a thread about it here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zulip-devel/8iz25Ad-Kiw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zulip-devel/8iz25Ad-...
- tabbott 11y ago
  https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/33 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/33 is open for adding a slick GitLab integration

lisianne 11y ago

Wow. Great news. Very good alternative to slack.

ausjke 11y ago

indeed a great move, the part I don't get is that why dropbox acquired it then opensource it? what's the logic behind this...

tkinom 11y ago
I have the same questions too. Acquihire? Also, how is zulip compare to slack in term of features, stability, pro/con? I tried search youtube for any zulip demo/screencast, can't find anything - very strange.

jnpatel 11y ago

I haven't yet tried Zulip's threading model, but I can certainly say I'm not pleased with Slack's. It can be very frustrating to try and trace a conversation backwards in a crowded Slack channel. I haven't used IRC in a while, but at least my client had a feature to toggle highlighting on a back-and-forth conversation, but that wasn't perfect.

cdixon 11y ago

Commoditize the complement: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

aikah 11y ago

Nice, it looks like an excellent Django app to study.

tabbott 11y ago
If you're looking for interesting elements, the REQ framework for doing argument validation I'm pretty happy with and have been thinking would be good to try to extend to be part of Django upstream.

e12e 11y ago

A couple of Zulip questions: 1) Is there any support for federation? At first glance it looks like every installation might have multiple servers, but more for balancing load, than federation? 2) How well is the protocol specified? How hard would it be to par down the requirements to eg: just python and sqlite/lmdb or redis (or zodb...)? Say if one wants to support just ~100 users or so?

tabbott 11y ago
(1) Not currently, though you can certainly imagine doing it and having it work well; the core data model doesn't change very much over time. (2) There's a reasonably well-specific API, and you could imagine building an independent implementation that fit that API and feeling good about doing so. But I feel like that would probably be a lot of work and you could probably much more easier achieve whatever your actual goal without paring down the dependencies very much. E.g. the relatively high minimum recommended RAM for a Zulip server is mostly due to running 20 Python processes for all the queue workers, most of which are idle all the time. If we wanted to decrease the memory requirements, there's a variety of ways to solve that problem directly that are a lot easier than doing a rewrite :).

orliesaurus 11y ago

No one mentioned gitter.im, weird...

pjtr 11y ago

What do Zulip / Slack / Hipchat / IRC / ... people do for screensharing and (group) voice calls? We'd love the chat improvements, but without screensharing and voice we're stuck on Skype. :(

loosescrews 11y ago
There is also Chromebox for Meetings[1]: https://www.google.com/work/chrome/devices/for-meetings/ https://www.google.com/work/chrome/devices/for-meetings/
gglanzani 11y ago
Hipchat does screensharing and voice/video (although not yet group).
eeZi 11y ago
https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

benwilber0 11y ago

who cares. seriously. group chat is a solved problem.

relaxitup 11y ago

LDAP support?

lwf 11y ago
We have an authentication backend for that: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f3aa7200c14e7c626/zproject/backends.py#L130 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f...

vegabook 11y ago

Is it possible to have secure chats that the server cannot read?

mapletune 11y ago

Does anyone know if Zulip has support for directory integration? whether it's OpenLDAP or MS AD. Hell, even RADIUS would be ok by me... @@

lwf 11y ago
LDAP is supported: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f3aa7200c14e7c626/zproject/backends.py#L130 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f... Also, generic webserver-side REMOTE_USER authentication is supported.
- mapletune 11y ago
  thanks~! Going to try it out then =p

alkonaut 11y ago

Has anyone switched workplace chat from skype to something else? I don't much like the chat bits in Skype but on the other hand the voice bit is fantastic. I can't imagine having to manage two separate contact lists for chat and voice, so I'm reluctant to switch to something that doesn't have good voice or integrates with something that has (e.g. launch group call from a chat conversation).

moreorless 11y ago

Those bastards!! Got me all excited with the Plan 9 tease. ;(

darkarmani 11y ago

Wow. Good luck installing this. I'm not touching it. It needs to do all sorts of hokey things to work. It needs puppet and git to work? You can't just install python packages, it installs them from a ppa. Deployment is a huge mess. It doesn't have to be this hard.

lwf 11y ago
Thanks for the feedback. We prioritised getting this into a state where it can run in dev and production based on the existing deployment processes we used in our own environment. I'm working on a Debian package[1], and we expect to iterate on the deployment process in general. 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800052 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800052

reeboblue 11y ago

Anyone have recommendations for a free SSL cert provider so that I can test this out?