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Improve development guide

Development setup

This is a guide to running the Zulip desktop app from a source tree, in order to contribute to developing it. The Zulip electron development environment can be installed on macOS, Windows, and Linux (Debian or Ubuntu recommended). You’ll need at least 2GB of available RAM. Installing the Zulip electron development environment requires downloading several hundred megabytes of dependencies, so you will need an active, reasonably fast, internet connection throughout the entire installation processes.

Set up Git & GitHub

You can skip this step if you already have Git, GitHub.

Follow our Git Guide in order to install Git, set up a GitHub account

Install Prerequisites

Jump to:

MacOS

Node JS Go to the Node.js Downloads page. Download Node.js for MacOS (v6.9.0 or above recommended). Run the downloaded Node.js .pkg Installer. You're finished! To ensure Node.js has been installed, run node -v in your terminal - you should get something like v6.9.0 or above

if NPM and node-gyp don't come bundled with your Node.js installation, Download manually

Now you are ready for next step : Get Zulip Electron Code.

Ubuntu/Debian

If you’re in a hurry, you can copy and paste the following into your terminal

sudo apt install git nodejs node-gyp python build-essential snapcraft libxext-dev libxtst-dev lib   xkbfile-dev libgconf-2-4

after pasting you can jump to next step : Get Zulip Electron Code.

For a step-by-step explanation, read on.

  1. Node JS

    $ sudo apt-get install nodejs

  2. Install Node-gyp

  3. Python (v2.7.x recommended)

    $ sudo apt install python2.7

  4. C++ compiler compatible with C++11

    $ sudo apt install build-essential

  5. Snapcraft

    $ sudo apt install snapcraft

  6. Development headers

    $ sudo apt install libxext-dev libxtst-dev libxkbfile-dev libgconf-2-4

if NPM don't come bundled with your Node.js installation, Download manually

Now you are ready for next step : Get Zulip Electron Code.

Windows

Node JS Go to the Node.js Downloads page. Download Node.js for windows (v6.9.0 or above recommended). Run the downloaded Node.js .msi Installer. You're finished! To ensure Node.js has been installed, run node -v in your terminal - you should get something like v6.9.0 or above

Followings are optional yet recommended prerequisites -

Cmder

  1. Download the latest release
  2. Extract the archive. Note: This path should not be C:\Program Files or anywhere else that would require Administrator access for modifying configuration files
  3. (optional) Place your own executable files into the %cmder_root%\bin folder to be injected into your PATH.
  4. Run Cmder.exe

Chocolatey
You can download chocolatey from here https://chocolatey.org/ and for Installing Chocolatey on your machine follow this steps

  1. First, ensure that you are using an administrative shell.
  2. Copy the text specific to your command shell - cmd.exe or powershell.exe.
  3. Paste the copied text into your shell and press Enter.
  4. Wait a few seconds for the command to complete.
  5. If you don't see any errors, you are ready to use Chocolatey! Type choco or choco -?

System specific dependencies

  • use only 32bit or 64bit for all of the installers, do not mix architectures
  • install using default settings
  • open Windows Powershell as Admin and paste this C:\Windows\system32> npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

if NPM and node-gyp don't come bundled with your Node.js installation, Download manually

Now you are ready for next step : Get Zulip Electron Code.

Get Zulip Electron Code

  1. In your browser, visit https://github.com/zulip/zulip-electron and click the fork button. You will need to be logged in to GitHub to do this.
  2. Open Terminal (macOS/Ubuntu) or Git BASH (Windows; must run as an Administrator).
  3. In Terminal/Git BASH, clone your fork of the zulip-electron repository and connect the zulip-electron upstream repository

Clone to your machine

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of your fork repository.

  2. Under the repository name, click Clone or download.

  3. In the Clone with HTTPs section, click to copy the clone URL for the repository.

  4. Open Terminal, Change the current working directory to the location where you want the cloned directory to be made.

     git clone https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/zulip-electron.git

Don’t forget to replace YOURUSERNAME with your git username

Connect your fork to zulip-electron upstream

cd zulip-electron
git remote add -f upstream https://github.com/zulip/zulip-electron.git

build and run

Install project dependencies:

$ npm install

There two ways to start the app:

vanilla method

 $ npm start

start and watch changes recommended for dev’s

  $ npm run dev