UPDATE <2015-12-20 Sun>: Zulip repo itself now has docker support which is much cleaner than what I had done.

UPDATE <2015-11-15 Sun>: webpack with this config is not working neatly so while running docker image checking out revision ae04744

After attending RC, punchagan had mentioned about Zulip quite a few times on google-talk based bot which we use for communication. There were few discussions among the group about trying something else like Slack or other tool which could cater to group spread across different channels(watsapp, hangout, legacy google-talk) along with rich features like sharing photos, docs etc. As Zulip got released sometime back we were excited to give it a try.

It got released on Friday so we thought of giving it a shot over the weekend and try to get something with which we can play around. As we were looking at initial documentation it involved lot of sudos for setup. While we had access to server we didn't want to experiment things on system level, so we thought of trying Docker. With a sample ubuntu image we quickly got all dependencies installed and were able to run run-dev.py file.

To get a "standard" setup we thought we will try to run different services on different containers like instructed here. But soon we ran into issue of manually editing code in zulip setup to initialize different services(DB, rabbitmq etc). And I think I was not doing it the right way, I was installing most of packages in all containers. So we reverted to having a Dockerfile with one container having complete setup.

Now there is PR related to Docker setup for Zulip too. But being a starter with docker I wasn't quite sure of all the steps being done there. We ended up with this setup, Dockerfile, a shell script and two custom scripts(though in subprocess command of dev-run.py there is check to make sure process_fts_updates work without password but it wasn't working from shell script and second file is just commenting out part of forms.py where for registration there are certain checks.)

Build the docker instance:

$ sudo docker build -t zulip-instance .

And finally to get the instance up:

$ sudo docker run --name zulip -i -t -p 9991:9991 zulip-instance

There are still issues like, there should be some bots present initially to create users and realms. And while trying to understand management commands to do the same(creating a bot user) seems to have circular dependency with the step of "notify_created_user". Or maybe I have overlooked something during this step. Also the settings are development, settings for production things would be different.