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Development Community

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The primary communication forum for the Zulip community is the Zulip server hosted at chat.zulip.org:

  • Users and administrators of Zulip organizations stop by to ask questions, offer feedback, and participate in product design discussions.
  • Contributors to the project, including the core Zulip development team, discuss ongoing and future projects, brainstorm ideas, and generally help each other out.

Everyone is welcome to sign up and participate — we love hearing from our users! Public channels in the community receive thousands of messages a week. We recommend signing up using the special invite links for users, self-hosters and contributors to get a curated list of initial channel subscriptions.

To get help in real time, you will have the best luck finding core developers during daylight hours in North America (roughly between 15:00 UTC and 1:00 UTC), but the sun never sets on the Zulip community. Most questions get a reply within minutes to a few hours.

Before posting your first message, please read the community norms section below in its entirety. It explains how to engage with the Zulip community.

You can also read conversations in the community without creating an account. If you are evaluating using Zulip for your organization, check out these tips for exploring the product in action in the development community.

Community norms

How we communicate

  • Use informal language; there’s no need for titles like “Sir” or “Madam”.
  • Use gender-neutral language. For example:
    • Good: Does anyone need a review on their PR?
    • Not good: Does anyone need a review on his PR?
  • Aim to communicate professionally, using full sentences with correct spelling and grammar.
  • Do not post AI-generated messages -- we want to read your own genuine expression of your thoughts. It's fine to use whatever tools you like for help with spelling, grammar, or translation.
  • Follow the community code of conduct.

Read the guide on how we communicate to learn more.

How to ask for help

  • Formulate a clear question, which includes an appropriate amount of context and a specific request for help. Link to relevant references (e.g., GitHub issues, Zulip's documentation, etc.).
  • When relevant, include the full traceback in a code block (not a screenshot).
  • If working on a code contribution, try to solve your own problem first, including reading through relevant documentation and code. Identify and describe the precise point on which you feel stuck.

Moderators read every public channel, and make sure that questions are addressed. To avoid disrupting work in the community:

  • Never ask the same question in multiple places.
  • If you are new to the community, default to never using @-mentions. Unnecessary mentions make it harder for Zulip's maintainers to see and respond to urgent messages. You can use Zulip's silent mentions to refer to a user without notifying them.

How to give feedback

If you have ideas for how to make Zulip better, we’d love to hear from you! Learn how to report bugs, suggest features and improvements, and share your experience with Zulip.

Where to post

  • Ask questions in channels, rather than DMing core contributors. You’ll get answers faster since more people can help, and others will be able to benefit from the discussion.
  • Start a new topic unless you’re replying to an existing conversation.
  • If you like, introduce yourself in the #new members channel, using your name as the topic. Tells us what brings you to the community!
  • Test messages should only be sent to the #test here channel, or as DMs to yourself.

The section below gives a detailed overview of the channels in the Zulip community — take a look there to learn more.

Where do I send my message?

This section describes popular public channels on chat.zulip.org. Kick off the discussion by starting a new topic in the appropriate channel! Don’t stress too much about picking the right place if you’re not sure; anyone in the community can edit a topic name, and moderators can move a topic to a different channel.

Channels for everyone

  • #feedback is for posting feedback on Zulip, including feature requests, suggestions for improvements to the UI or existing features, or anything else! We also appreciate hearing about how Zulip is used in your organization.
  • #integrations is for bug reports or questions about integrations.
  • #issues is for reporting bugs (or possible bugs) in the Zulip web app or server implementation.
  • #mobile, #desktop, and #zulip-terminal are the best places to post bug reports or questions about Zulip's apps. Note that #desktop should only be used for issues specific to the desktop app, which shares most of its UI and implementation with the web app.
  • Everyone is welcome to introduce themselves in #new members. Posting here with your name as the topic is a great option if you’re uncertain where to start a conversation.
  • #test here is for sending test messages without inconveniencing other users :). We recommend muting this channel when not using it.

Channels for Zulip users and administrators

Channels for code contributors

All codebases

  • #git help is for help with using Git.
  • #code review is for getting feedback on your work. We encourage all developers to comment on work posted here, even if you’re new to the Zulip project; reviewing other PRs is a great way to develop experience, and even just manually testing a proposed new feature and posting feedback is super helpful. Note that GitHub is our primary system for managing code reviews.
  • #api design is a low-traffic channel for discussing and coordinating changes to the Zulip API, with all stakeholders present.
  • #documentation is the right place for general conversations about work on documentation (including design discussions, questions, updates on a project, or anything else).

Server and web app

  • #development help is for asking for help with any Zulip server/web app development work.
  • #provision help is for help specifically on setting up the server/web app development environment. #tools is other conversations about the server/web app developer tooling.
  • #backend and #frontend are the right place for general conversations about work on the Zulip server and web app respectively (including design discussions, questions, updates on a project, or anything else).
  • #design is the place to discuss the detailed UI and UX design of a change you're working on, meaning how it looks and how it behaves as seen by the user. (Technical discussions, including how the code itself is designed, go in one of the other channels above.)
  • #automated testing is primarily used for automated notifications about CI failures, but is also a good place to discuss projects to improve Zulip’s automated testing infrastructure.

Mobile app

  • #mobile-dev-help is for asking for help with any development work on the Zulip mobile app.
  • #mobile-team is the right place for general conversations about work on the mobile app (including technical design discussions, questions, updates on a project, or anything else).
  • #mobile-design is the place to discuss the detailed UI and UX design of a change you're working on, meaning how it looks and how it behaves as seen by the user. (Technical discussions, including how the code itself is designed, go in one of the other channels above.)
  • #mobile is primarily for user feedback and issue reports, not work on the code.

Desktop and terminal apps

Channels for translators

Channels for anyone spending time in the community

  • #announce is our low-traffic channel for project announcements (releases, etc.).
  • #checkins is for progress updates on what you’re working on and its status; usually folks post with their name as the topic. Everyone is welcome to participate!
  • #design and #mobile-design are where we discuss UI and feature design and collect feedback on potential design changes. We love feedback, so take a look at the active discussions and don’t hesitate to speak up!
<p>These "design" channels are primarily intended for discussing changes the community is actively working on. For starting a topic to propose a new design change, the best place is [#feedback](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/137-feedback) or [#mobile](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/48-mobile).</p> - [#discussions](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/277-discussions) is where we do fun community conversations like “Ask Me Anything” Q&A sessions with project members. - [#documentation](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/19-documentation) and [#api documentation](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/412-api-documentation) are where we discuss improving Zulip’s user, sysadmin, API, and developer documentation. - [#general](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/2-general) is for all topics of general interest. - [#learning](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/92-learning) is for posting great learning resources one comes across. - [#off topic](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/97-off-topic) is is for occasional conversations not related to Zulip, usually things of general interest to open-source communities.

You can always find the description for the channel you’re reading at the top of the Zulip app.

Anything else to keep in mind?

Don’t try to read everything

Keeping up with everything happening in the Zulip project is both difficult and rarely a useful goal. To make the best use of your time, we highly recommend that you unsubscribe from channels that you aren’t interested in, mute channels that are only of occasional interest, and make use of Zulip’s skimming features, like Recent conversations, to spend your time on topics that interest you.

Searching for past conversations

To look for previous threads about something, we recommend using the following search filters: streams:public <your keyword(s)>.

This will search the full history of all public channels for <your keyword(s)>, including messages sent before you joined and messages on public channels you’re not subscribed to.

Linking to GitHub issues and pull requests

We've set up custom linkifiers so that it's easy to link to issues and pull requests in Zulip project repositories when composing a message or starting a new topic. Here are examples for linking to issue 1234 in the main Zulip project repositories:

New features are tested here

We continuously test out new features or ideas on chat.zulip.org before rolling them out to Zulip Cloud or including them in a Zulip Server release (or deciding not to!). Please report in #issues anything you notice that seems broken! It’s likely you’ve found a bug in an upcoming feature.