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Comment by ofrzeta | Hacker News Reader

On the downside, if you are self-hosting, Zulip requires a dedicated server (or VM). There are some efforts to make it run in a container but nothing that works really well.

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We (the Zulip core community) recently adopted the main third-party Docker implementation for Zulip (now https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip), and have been hard at work on cleaning it up and making its documentation high quality.

It's not at the level of polish we want it to be yet (which is why we recommend the "dedicated machine/VM" installation flow, which is super polished). But we expect the Docker setup to be quite nice in a couple months.

Thanks for the heads-up. I am sure this will help the adoption of your otherwise fine software. Keep up the good work! :)

It may not have a fully supported docker container, but it should work just fine in an LXD container. I think their installation instructions ask a dedicated machine only because their installer installs packages at the system-level.

What kind of kernel-level stuff does it do that requires you to use a full VM? Stuff like this should be an apt-gettable package, not something for a container or even VM...

I think GPs point was that it requires a full system/machine onto which you can install it, be it VM or bare metal (which doesn't look too involved, based on the documentation[1]), but that it won't work as/in a container.

GP: Could you post some information on the issues with containers?

[1] https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...

Well, requiring a dedicated machine is what the docs say, and it's what the installer presupposes. Sure you could make it work on box that is already hosting other sites or applications but you might need to do a lot of stuff manually.

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