Version history

This page contains the release history for the Zulip 5.x stable release series. See the current Zulip changelog for newer release series, or the commit log for an up-to-date list of raw changes.

Zulip 5.x series

5.1 – 2022-04-01

  • Fixed upgrade bug where preexisting animated emoji would still always animate in statuses.

  • Improved check that prevents servers from accidentally downgrading, to not block upgrading servers that originally installed Zulip Server prior to mid-2017.

  • Fixed email address de-duplication in Slack imports.

  • Prevented an extraneous scrollbar when a notification banner was present across the top.

  • Fixed installation in LXC containers, which failed due to chrony not being runnable there.

  • Prevented a “push notifications not configured” warning from appearing in the new user default settings panel even when push notifications were configured.

  • Fixed a bug which, in uncommon configurations, would prevent Tornado from being restarted during upgrades; users would be able to log in, but would immediately be logged out.

  • Updated translations.

5.0 – 2022-03-29

Highlights

  • New resolve topic feature allows marking topics as ✔ completed. It’s a lightweight way to manage a variety of workflows, including support interactions, answering questions, and investigating issues.

  • Administrators may enable the option to create web-public streams. Web-public streams can be viewed by anyone on the Internet without creating an account in your organization.

  • Users can now select a status emoji alongside their status message. Status emoji are shown next to the user’s name in the sidebars, message feed, and compose box. Animated status emoji will only animate on hover.

  • Redesigned the compose box, adding formatting buttons for bold, italics and links as well as visual improvements. New button for inserting global times into your message.

  • Redesigned “Stream settings” to be much more usable, with separate tabs for personal settings, global settings, and membership, and more consistent style with the rest of Zulip’s settings.

  • Stream creation was redesigned with a much cleaner interface, especially for selecting initial subscribers.

  • Redesigned “Full user profile” widget to show the user’s stream and user group subscriptions. Administrators can unsubscribe a user from streams directly from their full profile.

  • Reorganized personal and organization settings to have clearer labels and make it easier to find privacy settings.

  • Organization administrators can now configure the default personal preference settings for new users joining the organization.

  • Most permissions settings now support choosing which roles have the permission, rather than just allowing administrators or everyone.

  • Permanent links to conversations now correctly redirect if the target message has been moved to a new stream or topic.

  • Added a data import tool for migrating from Rocket.Chat. Mattermost data import now supports importing uploaded files.

  • Improved handling of messages containing many images; now up to 20 images can be previewed in a single message (up from 5), and a new grid layout will be used.

  • OpenID Connect joins SAML, LDAP, Google, GitHub, Azure Active Directory, and more as a supported Single Sign-On provider.

  • SAML authentication now supports syncing custom profile fields. Additionally, SAML authentication now supports automatic account creation and IdP-initiated logout.

  • Added SCIM integration for synchronizing accounts with an external user database.

  • Added support for installation on ARM platforms (including Mac M1).

  • Removed support for Ubuntu 18.04, which no longer receives upstream security support for key Zulip dependencies.

Upgrade notes for 5.0

  • This release contains a migration, 0009_confirmation_expiry_date_backfill, that can take several minutes to run on a server with millions of messages of history.

  • The TERMS_OF_SERVICE and PRIVACY_POLICY settings have been removed in favor of a system that supports additional policy documents, such as a code of conduct. See the updated documentation for the new system.

Full feature changelog

  • Timestamps in Zulip messages are now permanent links to the message in its thread.

  • Added support for invitation links with configurable expiry, including links that never expire. Deactivating a user now disables all invitations that the user had sent.

  • Added support for expanding the compose box to be full-screen.

  • Added support for filtering events in webhooks.

  • Added support for overriding Zulip’s defaults for new users in your organization.

  • Added support for referring to a user group with a silent mention.

  • Added new personal privacy setting controlling whether typing notifications are sent to other users.

  • Added new personal setting controlling whether Esc navigates the user to the default view.

  • Split stream creation policy into separate settings for private, public, and web-public streams.

  • New integrations: Freshstatus, Lidarr, Open Collective, Radarr, Sonarr, SonarQube.

  • Message edit notifications now indicate how many messages were moved, when only part of a topic was moved.

  • Muted topic records are now moved when an entire topic is moved.

  • Search views that don’t mark messages as read now have an explanatory notice if any unread messages are present.

  • Added new “Scroll to bottom” widget hovering over the message feed.

  • Changed the default emoji set from Google Classic to Google Modern.

  • User groups mentions now correctly function as silent mentions when inside block quotes.

  • Messages that have been moved (but not otherwise edited) are now displayed as MOVED, not EDITED.

  • Reworked the UI for selecting a stream when moving topics.

  • Redesigned modals in the app to have more consistent and cleaner UX.

  • Added new topic filter widget in left sidebar zoomed view.

  • Redesigned Welcome Bot onboarding experience.

  • Redesigned hover behavior for timestamps and time mentions.

  • Messages sent by muted users can now be rehidden after being revealed. One can also now mute deactivated users.

  • Rewrote Help Center guides for new organizations and users, and made hundreds of other improvements to Help Center content and organization.

  • Reimplemented the image lightbox’s pan/zoom functionality to be nicer, allowing us to enable it be default.

  • Added styled loading page for the web application.

  • Webhook integrations now support specifying the target stream by ID.

  • Notifications now differentiate user group mentions from personal mentions.

  • Added support for configuring how long the server should wait before sending email notifications after a mention or PM.

  • Improved integrations: BigBlueButton, GitHub, Grafana, PagerDuty, and many more.

  • Improved various interaction and performance details in Recent Topics.

  • Improved styling for poll and todo list widgets.

  • Zulip now supports configuring the database name and username when using a remote Postgres server. Previously, these were hardcoded to “zulip”.

  • Migrated many tooltips to prettier tooltips powered by TippyJS.

  • Autocomplete is now available when editing topics.

  • Typeahead for choosing a topic now consistently fetches the full set of historical topics in the stream.

  • Changed “Quote and reply” to insert quoted content at the cursor when the compose box is not empty.

  • The compose box now has friendly UI for messages longer than 10K characters.

  • Compose typeahead now opens after typing only “@”.

  • Improved the typeahead sorting for choosing code block languages.

  • Many additional subtle usability improvements to compose typeahead.

  • Adjusted permissions to only allow administrators to override unicode emoji with a custom emoji of the same name.

  • New “Manage this user” option in user profile popovers simplifies moderation.

  • New automated notifications when changing global stream settings like description and message retention policy.

  • Drafts are now advertised more prominently, in the left sidebar.

  • Drafts and message edit history now correctly render widgets like spoilers and global times.

  • Improved the tooltip formatting for global times.

  • LDAP userAccountControl logic now supports FreeIPA quirks.

  • Fixed a problem where self-hosted servers that permuted the IDs of their users by using the data export/import tools might send mobile push notifications to the wrong devices.

  • Fixed various bugs resulting in missing translations; most importantly in the in-application search/markdown/hotkeys help widgets.

  • Fixed several bugs that prevented browser undo from working in the compose box.

  • Fixed search typeahead not working once you’ve added a full-text keyword.

  • Fixed linkifier validation to prevent invalid linkifiers.

  • Fixed Ctrl+. shortcut not working correctly with empty topics.

  • Fixed numerous corner case bugs with email and mobile push notifications.

  • Fixed a bug resulting in long LaTeX messages failing to render.

  • Fixed buggy logic displaying users’ last active time.

  • Fixed confusing “delete stream” language for archiving streams.

  • Fixed exceptions in races involving messages being deleted while processing a request to add emoji reactions, mark messages as read, or sending notifications.

  • Fixed most remaining 500 errors seen in Zulip Cloud (these were already quite rare, so this process involved debugging several rare races, timeouts, and error handling bugs.).

  • Fixed subtle bugs involving composing messages to deactivated users.

  • Fixed subtle bugs with reloading the page while viewing settings with “Recent topics” as the default view.

  • Fixed bug where pending email notifications could be lost when restarting the Zulip server.

  • Fixed “require topics” setting not being enforced for API clients.

  • Fixed several subtle Markdown rendering bugs.

  • Fixed several bugs with message edit history and stream/topic moves.

  • Fixed multiple subtle bugs that could cause compose box content to not be properly saved as drafts in various situations.

  • Fixed several server bugs involving rare race conditions.

  • Fixed a bug where different messages in search results would be incorrectly shown with a shared recipient bar despite potentially not being temporally adjacent.

  • Fixed lightbox download button not working with the S3 upload backend.

  • Increased default retention period before permanently removing deleted messages from 7 days to 30 days.

  • Rate limiting now supports treating all Tor exit nodes as a single IP.

  • Changed “From” header in invitation emails to no longer include the name of the user who sent the invitation, to prevent anti-phishing software from flagging invitations.

  • Added support for uploading animated PNGs as custom emoji.

  • Renamed “Night mode” to “Dark theme”.

  • Added the mobile app’s notification sound to desktop sound options, as “Chime”.

  • Reworked the manage.py help interface to hide Django commands that are useless or harmful to run on a production system. Also deleted several useless management commands.

  • Improved help and functionality of several management commands. New create_realm management command supports some automation workflows.

  • Added RealmAuditLog logging for most administrative actions that were previously not tracked.

  • Added automated testing of the upgrade process from previous releases, to reduce the likelihood of problems upgrading Zulip.

  • Attempting to “upgrade” to an older version now gives a clear error message.

  • Optimized critical parts of the message sending code path for large organizations.

  • Optimized creating streams in very large organizations.

  • Certain unprintable Unicode characters are no longer permitted in topic names.

  • Added IP-based rate limiting for unauthenticated requests.

  • Added documentation for Zulip’s rate-limiting rules.

  • Merged the API endpoints for a user’s personal settings into the /settings endpoint with a cleaner interface.

  • The server API now supports marking messages as unread, allowing this upcoming mobile app feature to work with Zulip 5.0.

  • Added to the API most page-load parameters used by the web app application that were missing from the /register API.

  • Simplified the infrastructure for rendering API documentation so that only a few pages require Markdown templates in addition to the OpenAPI specification file.

  • Corrected many minor issues with the API documentation.

  • Major improvements to both the infrastructure and content for Zulip’s ReadTheDocs documentation for contributors and sysadmins.

  • Major improvements to the mypy type-checking, discovered via using the django-stubs project to get Django stubs.

  • Renamed main branch from master to main.

Zulip 4.x series

Zulip 4.11 – 2022-03-15

  • CVE-2022-24751: Zulip Server 4.0 and above were susceptible to a race condition during user deactivation, where a simultaneous access by the user being deactivated may, in rare cases, allow continued access by the deactivated user. This access could theoretically continue until one of the following events happens:

    • The session expires from memcached; this defaults to two weeks, and is controlled by SESSION_COOKIE_AGE in /etc/zulip/settings.py

    • The session cache is evicted from memcached by other cached data.

    • The server is upgraded, which clears the cache.

  • Updated translations.

Zulip 4.10 – 2022-02-25

  • CVE-2022-21706: Reusable invitation links could be improperly used for other organizations.

  • CVE-2021-3967: Enforce that regenerating an API key must be done with an API key, not a cookie. Thanks to nhiephon (twitter.com/_nhiephon) for their responsible disclosure of this vulnerability.

  • Fixed a bug with the reindex-textual-data tool, where it would sometimes fail to find the libraries it needed.

  • Pin PostgreSQL to 10.19, 11.14, 12.9, 13.5 or 14.1 to avoid a regression which caused deploys with PGroonga enabled to unpredictably fail database queries with the error variable not found in subplan target list.

  • Fix ARM64 support; however, the wal-g binary is not yet supported on ARM64 (zulip/zulip#21070).

Zulip 4.9 – 2022-01-24

  • CVE-2021-43799: Remote execution of code involving RabbitMQ.

  • Closed access to RabbitMQ port 25672; initial installs tried to close this port, but failed to restart RabbitMQ for the configuration.

  • Removed the rabbitmq.nodename configuration in zulip.conf; all RabbitMQ instances will be reconfigured to have a nodename of zulip@localhost. You can remove this setting from your zulip.conf configuration file, if it exists.

  • Added missing support for the Camo image proxy in the Docker image. This resolves a longstanding issue with image previews, if enabled, appearing as broken images for Docker-based installs.

  • Fixed a bug which allowed a user to edit a message to add a wildcard mention when they did not have permissions to send such messages originally.

  • Fixed a bug in the tool that corrects database corruption caused by updating the operating system hosting PostgreSQL, which previously omitted some indexes from its verification. If you updated the operating system of your Zulip instance from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04, or from Debian 9 to 10, you should run the tool, even if you did so previously; full details and instructions are available in the previous blog post.

  • Began routing requests from the Camo image proxy through a non-Smokescreen proxy, if one is configured; because Camo includes logic to deny access to private subnets, routing its requests through Smokescreen is generally not necessary.

  • Fixed a bug where changing the Camo secret required running zulip-puppet-apply.

  • Fixed scripts/setup/compare-settings-to-template to be able to run from any directory.

  • Switched Let’s Encrypt renewal to use its own timer, rather than our custom cron job. This fixes a bug where occasionally nginx would not reload after getting an updated certificate.

  • Updated documentation and tooling to note that installs using upgrade-zulip-from-git require 3 GB of RAM, or 2 GB and at least 1 GB of swap.

Zulip 4.8 – 2021-12-01

  • CVE-2021-43791: Zulip could fail to enforce expiration dates on confirmation keys, allowing users to potentially use expired invitations, self-registrations, or realm creation links.

  • Began installing Smokescreen to harden Zulip against SSRF attacks by default. Zulip has offered Smokescreen as an option since Zulip 4.0. Existing installs which configured an outgoing proxy which is not on localhost:4750 will continue to use that; all other installations will begin having a Smokescreen installation listening on 127.0.0.1, which Zulip will proxy traffic through. The version of Smokescreen was also upgraded.

  • Replaced the camo image proxy with go-camo, a maintained reimplementation that also protects against SSRF attacks. This server now listens only on 127.0.0.1 when it is deployed as part of a standalone deployment.

  • Began using camo for images displayed in URL previews. This improves privacy and also resolves an issue where an image link to a third party server with an expired or otherwise invalid SSL certificate would trigger a confusing pop-up window for Zulip Desktop users.

  • Fixed a bug which could cause Tornado to shut down improperly (causing an immediate full-page reload for their clients) when restarting a heavily loaded Zulip server.

  • Updated Python dependencies.

  • Truncated large “remove” mobile notification events so that marking hundreds of private messages or other notifiable messages as read at once won’t exceed Apple’s 4 KB notification size limit.

  • Slack importer improvements:

    • Ensured that generated fake email addresses for Slack bots are unique.

    • Added support for importing Slack exports from a directory, not just a .zip file.

    • Provided better error messages with invalid Slack tokens.

    • Added support for non-ASCII Unicode folder names on Windows.

  • Add support for V3 Pagerduty webhook.

  • Updated documentation for Apache SSO, which now requires additional configuration now that Zulip uses a C extension (the re2 module).

  • Fixed a bug where an empty name in a SAML response would raise an error.

  • Ensured that deliver_scheduled_emails and deliver_scheduled_messages did not double-deliver if run on multiple servers at once.

  • Extended Certbot troubleshooting documentation.

  • Fixed a bug in soft deactivation catch-up code, in cases where a race condition had created multiple subscription deactivation entries for a single user and single stream in the audit log.

  • Updated translations, including adding a Sinhala translation.

4.7 – 2021-10-04

  • CVE-2021-41115: Prevent organization administrators from affecting the server with a regular expression denial-of-service attack through linkifier patterns.

4.6 – 2021-09-23

  • Documented official support for Debian 11 Bullseye, now that it is officially released by Debian upstream.

  • Fixed installation on Debian 10 Buster. Upstream infrastructure had broken the Python virtualenv tool on this platform, which we’ve worked around for this release.

  • Zulip releases are now distributed from https://download.zulip.com/server/, replacing the old www.zulip.org server.

  • Added support for LDAP synchronization of the is_realm_owner and is_moderator flags.

  • upgrade-zulip-from-git now uses git fetch --prune; this ensures upgrade-zulip-from-git master with return an error rather than using a stale cached version of the master branch, which was renamed to main this month.

  • Added a new reset_authentication_attempt_count management command to allow sysadmins to manually reset authentication rate limits.

  • Fixed a bug that caused the upgrade-postgresql tool to incorrectly remove supervisord configuration for process-fts-updates.

  • Fixed a rare migration bug when upgrading from Zulip versions 2.1 and older.

  • Fixed a subtle bug where the left sidebar would show both old and new names for some topics that had been renamed.

  • Fixed incoming email gateway support for configurations with the http_only setting enabled.

  • Fixed issues where Zulip’s outgoing webhook, with the Slack-compatible interface, had a different format from Slack’s documented interface.

  • The installation and upgrade documentations now show the latest release’s version number.

  • Backported many improvements to the ReadTheDocs documentation.

  • Updated translation data from Transifex.

4.5 – 2021-07-25

  • Added a tool to fix potential database corruption caused by host OS upgrades (was listed in 4.4 release notes, but accidentally omitted).

4.4 – 2021-07-22

  • Fixed a possible denial-of-service attack in Markdown fenced code block parsing.

  • Smokescreen, if installed, now defaults to only listening on 127.0.0.1; this prevents it from being used as an open HTTP proxy if it did not have other firewalls protecting incoming port 4750.

  • Fixed a performance/scalability issue for installations using the S3 file uploads backend.

  • Fixed a bug where users could turn other users’ messages they could read into widgets (e.g. polls).

  • Fixed a bug where emoji and avatar image requests were sent through Camo; doing so does not add any security benefit, and broke custom emoji that had been imported from Slack in Zulip 1.8.1 or earlier.

  • Changed to log just a warning, instead of an exception, in the case that the embed_links worker cannot fetch previews for all links in a message within the 30-second timeout. Each preview request within a message already has a 15-second timeout.

  • Ensured psycopg2 is installed before starting process_fts_updates; otherwise, it might fail to start several times before the package was installed.

  • Worked around a bug in supervisor where, when using SysV init, /etc/init.d/supervisor restart would only have stopped, not restarted, the process.

  • Modified upgrade scripts to better handle failure, and suggest next steps and point to logs.

  • Zulip now hides the “show password” eye icon that IE and Edge browsers place in password inputs; this duplicated the already-present JavaScript-based functionality.

  • Fixed “OR” glitch on login page if SAML authentication is enabled but not configured.

  • The send_test_email management command now shows the full SMTP conversation on failure.

  • Provided a change_password management command which takes a --realm option.

  • Fixed upgrade-zulip-from-git crashing in CSS source map generation on 1-CPU systems.

  • Added an auto_signup field in SAML configuration to auto-create accounts upon first login attempt by users which are authenticated by SAML.

  • Provided better error messages when puppet_classes in zulip.conf are mistakenly space-separated instead of comma-separated.

  • Updated translations for many languages.

4.3 – 2021-06-02

  • Fixed exception when upgrading older servers with the JITSI_SERVER_URL setting set to None to disable Jitsi.

  • Fixed GIPHY integration dropdown appearing when the server doesn’t have a GIPHY API key configured.

  • The GIPHY API library is no longer loaded for users who are not actively using the GIPHY integration.

  • Improved formatting for Grafana integration.

  • Fixed previews of Dropbox image links.

  • Fixed support for storing avatars/emoji in non-S3 upload backends.

  • Fixed an overly strict database constraint for code playgrounds.

  • Tagged user status strings for translation.

  • Updated translation data from Transifex.

4.2 – 2021-05-13

  • Fixed exception in purge-old-deployments when upgrading on a system that has never upgraded using Git.

  • Fixed installation from a directory readable only by root.

4.1 – 2021-05-13

  • Fixed exception upgrading to the 4.x series from older releases.

4.0 – 2021-05-13

Highlights

  • Code blocks now have a copy-to-clipboard button and can be integrated with external code playgrounds, making it convenient to work with code while discussing it in Zulip.

  • Added a new organization Moderator role. Many permissions settings for sensitive features now support only allowing moderators and above to use the feature.

  • Added a native Giphy integration for sending animated GIFs.

  • Added support for muting another user.

  • Recent topics is no longer beta, no longer an overlay, supports composing messages, and is now the default view. The previous default view, “All messages”, is still available, and the default view can now be configured via “Display settings”.

  • Completed API documentation for Zulip’s real-time events system. It is now possible to write a decent Zulip client with minimal interaction with the Zulip server development team.

  • Added new organization settings: wildcard mention policy.

  • Integrated Smokescreen, an outgoing proxy designed to help protect against SSRF attacks; outgoing HTTP requests that can be triggered by end users are routed through this service. We recommend that self-hosted installations configure it.

  • This release contains more than 30 independent changes to the Zulip API, largely to support new features or make the API (and thus its documentation) clearer and easier for clients to implement. Other new API features support better error handling for the mobile and terminal apps.

  • The frontend internationalization library was switched from i18next to FormatJS.

  • The button for replying was redesigned to show the reply recipient and be more obvious to users coming from other chat apps.

  • Added support for moving topics to private streams, and for configuring which roles can move topics between streams.

Upgrade notes for 4.0

  • Changed the Tornado service to use 127.0.0.1:9800 instead of 127.0.0.1:9993 as its default network address, to simplify support for multiple Tornado processes. Since Tornado only listens on localhost, this change should have no visible effect unless another service is using port 9800.

  • Zulip’s top-level puppet classes have been renamed, largely from zulip::foo to zulip::profile::foo. Configuration referencing these /etc/zulip/zulip.conf will be automatically updated during the upgrade process, but if you have a complex deployment or you maintain zulip.conf is another system (E.g. with the manual configuration option for docker-zulip), you’ll want to manually update the puppet_classes variable.

  • Zulip’s supervisord configuration now lives in /etc/supervisor/conf.d/zulip/

  • Consider enabling Smokescreen

  • Private streams can no longer be default streams (i.e. the ones new users are automatically added to).

  • New scripts/start-server and scripts/stop-server mean that one no longer needs to use supervisorctl directly for these tasks.

  • As this is a major release, we recommend carefully updating the inline documentation in your /etc/zulip/settings.py. Notably, we rewrote the template to be better organized and more readable in this release.

  • The web app will now display a warning in the UI if the Zulip server has not been upgraded in more than 18 months. template to be better organized and more readable.

  • The next time users log in to Zulip with their password after upgrading to this release, they will be logged out of all active browser sessions (i.e. the web and desktop apps). This is a side effect of improved security settings (increasing the minimum entropy used when salting passwords from 71 bits to 128 bits).

  • We’ve removed the partial Thumbor integration from Zulip. The Thumbor project appears to be dead upstream, and we no longer feel comfortable including it in Zulip from a security perspective. We hope to introduce a fully supported thumbnailing integration in our next major release.

Full feature changelog

  • Added new release lifecycle documentation.

  • Added support for subscribing another stream’s membership to a stream.

  • Added RealmAuditLog for most settings state changes in Zulip; this data will facilitate future features showing a log of activity by a given user or changes to an organization’s settings.

  • Added support for using Sentry for processing backend exceptions.

  • Added documentation for using wal-g for continuous PostgreSQL backups.

  • Added loading spinners for message editing widgets.

  • Added live update of compose placeholder text when recipients change.

  • Added keyboard navigation for popover menus that were missing it.

  • Added documentation for all zulip.conf settings.

  • Added dozens of new notification sound options.

  • Added menu option to unstar all messages in a topic.

  • Added confirmation dialog before unsubscribing from a private stream.

  • Added confirmation dialog before deleting your profile picture.

  • Added types for all parameters in the API documentation.

  • Added API endpoint to fetch user details by email address.

  • Added API endpoint to fetch presence details by user ID.

  • Added new LDAP configuration options for servers hosting multiple organizations.

  • Added new @**|user_id** mention syntax intended for use in bots.

  • Added preliminary support for Zulip on Debian 11; this release is expected to support Debian 11 without any further changes.

  • Added several useful new management commands, including change_realm_subdomain and delete_user.

  • Added support for subscribing all members of a user group to a stream.

  • Added support for sms: and tel: links.

  • Community topic editing time limit increased to 3 days for members.

  • New integrations: Freshping, Jotform, UptimeRobot, and a JSON formatter (which is particularly useful when developing a new integration).

  • Updated integrations: Clubhouse, NewRelic, Bitbucket, Zabbix.

  • Improved formatting of GitHub and GitLab integrations.

  • Improved the user experience for multi-user invitations.

  • Improved several rendered-message styling details.

  • Improved design of <time> widgets.

  • Improved format of nginx logs to include hostname and request time.

  • Redesigned the left sidebar menu icons (now \vdots, not a chevron).

  • The Zoom integration is now stable (no longer beta).

  • Favicon unread counts are more attractive and support large numbers.

  • Zulip now displays the total number of starred messages in the left sidebar by default; over 20% of users had enabled this setting manually.

  • Presence circles for users are now shown in mention typeahead.

  • Email notifications for new messages are now referred to as a “Message notification email”, not a “Missed message email”.

  • Zulip now sets List-Unsubscribe headers in outgoing emails with unsubscribe links.

  • Password forms now have a “Show password” widget.

  • Fixed performance issues when creating hundreds of new users in quick succession (E.g. at the start of a conference or event).

  • Fixed performance issues in organizations with thousands of online users.

  • Fixed numerous rare exceptions when running Zulip at scale.

  • Fixed several subtle installer bugs.

  • Fixed various UI and accessibility issues in the registration and new user invitation flows.

  • Fixed live update and UI bugs with streams being deactivated or renamed.

  • Fixed a subtle Firefox bug with Esc breaking keyboard accessibility.

  • Fixed name not being populated currently with Apple authentication.

  • Fixed several subtle bugs in the “Stream settings” UI.

  • Fixed error handling for incoming emails that fail to send.

  • Fixed a subtle bug with timestamps for messages that take a long time to send.

  • Fixed missing horizontal scrollbar for overflowing rendered LaTeX.

  • Fixed visual issues with bottoms areas of both sidebars.

  • Fixed several error handling bugs with outgoing webhooks.

  • Fixed bugs with recipient bar UI for muting and topic editing.

  • Fixed highlighting of adjacent alert words.

  • Fixed many settings API endpoints with unusual string encoding.

  • Fixed wildcard mentions in blockquotes not being treated as silent.

  • Increased size of typeahead box for mentions from 5 to 8.

  • Typeahead now always ranks exact string matches first.

  • Tooltips have been migrated from Bootstrap to TippyJS, and added in many places that previously just had title attributes.

  • Zulip now consistently uses the Source Code Pro font for code blocks, rather than varying by operating system.

  • Redesigned “Alert words” settings UI.

  • Linkifiers can now be edited in their settings page.

  • Tables in settings UI now have sticky headers.

  • Confirmation dialogs now consistently use Confirm/Cancel as button labels.

  • Refactored typeahead and emoji components to be shareable with the mobile codebase.

  • Switched to orjson for JSON serialization, resulting in better performance and more standards-compliant validation.

  • Outgoing webhooks now enforce a 10 second timeout.

  • Image previews in a Zulip message are now unconditionally proxied by Camo to improve privacy, rather than only when the URL was not HTTPS.

  • Replaced the old CasperJS frontend test suite with Puppeteer.

  • Split the previous api_super_user permission into can_create_user and can_forge_sender (used for mirroring).

  • Various API endpoints creating objects now return the ID of the created object.

  • Fixed screen reader accessibility of many components, including the compose box, message editing, popovers, and many more.

  • Fixed transparency issues uploading some animated GIFs as custom emoji.

  • Improved positioning logic for inline YouTube previews.

  • Improved performance of several high-throughput queue processors.

  • Improved performance of queries that fetch all active subscribers to a stream or set of streams.

  • Improved performance of sending messages to streams with thousands of subscribers.

  • Upgraded our ancient forked version of bootstrap, on a path towards removing the last forked dependencies from the codebase.

  • Upgraded Django to 3.1 (as well as essentially every other dependency).

  • Updated web app codebase to use many modern ES6 patterns.

  • Upgraded Zulip’s core font to Source Sans 3, which supports more languages.

  • Relabeled :smile: and :stuck_out_tongue: emoji to use better codepoints.

  • Reduced the size of Zulip’s main JavaScript bundle by removing moment.js.

  • Server logs now display the version number for Zulip clients.

  • Simplified logic for responsive UI with different browser sizes.

  • Fixed several subtle bugs in the compose and message-edit UIs.

  • Reduced the steady-state load for an idle Zulip server.

  • Removed HipChat import tool, because HipChat has been long EOL.

  • Reformatted the Python codebase with Black, and the frontend codebase with Prettier.

  • Migrated testing from CircleCI to GitHub Actions.

Zulip 3.x series

3.4 – April 14, 2021

  • CVE-2021-30487: Prevent administrators from moving topics to disallowed streams.

  • CVE-2021-30479: Prevent guest user access to all_public_streams API.

  • CVE-2021-30478: Prevent API super users from forging messages to other organizations.

  • CVE-2021-30477: Prevent outgoing webhook bots from sending arbitrary messages to any stream.

  • Fixed a potential HTML injection bug in outgoing emails.

  • Fixed Postfix configuration error which would prevent outgoing email to any email address containing ., +, or starting with mm, when configured to use the local Postfix to deliver outgoing email.

  • Fixed a backporting error which caused the manage.py change_user_role tool to not work for admin, member, or guest roles.

  • Add support for logout events sent from modern versions of the desktop application.

  • Upgraded minor python dependencies.

  • Minor documentation fixes.

3.3 – December 1, 2020

  • Guest users should not be allowed to post to streams marked “Only organization full members can post.” This flaw has existed since the feature was added in Zulip Server 3.0.

  • Permit outgoing mail from postfix; this resolves a bug introduced in Zulip Server 3.2 which prevented Zulip from sending outgoing mail if the local mail server (used mostly for incoming mail) was also used for outgoing email (MAIL_HOST='localhost').

  • Ensure that the upgrade-postgres tool upgrades the cluster’s data to the specific PostgreSQL version requested; this resolves a bug where, now that PostgreSQL 13 has been released, upgrade-postgres would attempt to upgrade to that version and not PostgreSQL 12.

  • Replace the impenetrably-named ./manage.py knight with ./manage.py change_user_role, and extend it to support “Organization owner” roles.

  • Handle realm emojis that have been manually deleted more gracefully.

3.2 – September 15, 2020

  • Switched from libmemcached to python-binary-memcached, a pure-Python implementation; this should eliminate memcached connection problems affecting some installations.

  • Removed unnecessary django-cookies-samesite dependency, which had its latest release removed from PyPI (breaking installation of Zulip 3.1).

  • Limited which local email addresses Postfix accepts when the incoming email integration is enabled; this prevents the enumeration of local users via the email system.

  • Fixed incorrectly case-sensitive email validation in REMOTE_USER authentication.

  • Fixed search results for has:image.

  • Fixed ability to adjust “Who can post on the stream” configuration.

  • Fixed display of “Permission [to post] will be granted in n days” for n > 365.

  • Support providing nginx_listen_port setting in conjunction with http_only in zulip.conf.

  • Improved upgrade documentation.

  • Removed internal ID lists which could leak into the events API.

3.1 – July 30, 2020

  • Removed unused short_name field from the User model. This field had no purpose and could leak the local part of email addresses when email address visibility was restricted.

  • Fixed a bug where loading spinners would sometimes not be displayed.

  • Fixed incoming email gateway exception with unstructured headers.

  • Fixed AlertWords not being included in data import/export.

  • Fixed Twitter previews not including a clear link to the tweet.

  • Fixed compose box incorrectly opening after uploading a file in a message edit widget.

  • Fixed exception in SAML integration with encrypted assertions.

  • Fixed an analytics migration bug that could cause upgrading from 2.x releases to fail.

  • Added a Thinkst Canary integration (and renamed the old one, which was actually an integration for canarytokens.org).

  • Reformatted the frontend codebase using prettier. This change was included in this maintenance release to ensure backporting patches from main remains easy.

3.0 – July 16, 2020

Highlights

  • Added support for Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. This release drops support for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and Debian 9 Stretch.

  • Redesigned the top navbar/search area to be much cleaner and show useful data like subscriber counts and stream descriptions in default views.

  • Added a new “recent topics” widget, which lets one browse recent and ongoing conversations at a glance. We expect this widget to replace “All messages” as the default view in Zulip in the next major release.

  • Redesigned “Notification settings” to have an intuitive table format and display any individual streams with non-default settings.

  • Added support for moving topics between streams. This was by far Zulip’s most-requested feature.

  • Added automatic theme detection using prefers-color-scheme.

  • Added support for GitLab and Sign in with Apple authentication.

  • Added an organization setting controlling who can use private messages.

  • Added support for default stream groups, which allow organizations to offer options of sets of streams when new users sign up. Currently can only be managed via the Zulip API.

  • The Zulip server now sets badge counts for the iOS mobile app.

  • Quote-and-reply now generates a handy link to the quoted message.

  • Upgraded Django from 1.11.x to the latest LTS series, 2.2.x.

  • Added integrations for ErrBit, Grafana, Thinkst Canary, and Alertmanager.

  • Extended API documentation to have detailed data on most responses, validated against the API’s actual implementation and against all tests in our extensive automated test suite.

  • Added support for programmable message retention policies, both a global/default policy and policies for specific streams.

  • Added a new incoming webhook API that accepts messages in the format used by Slack’s incoming webhooks API.

  • Introduced the Zulip API feature level, a concept that will greatly simplify the implementation of mobile, terminal, and desktop clients that need to talk to a wide range of supported Zulip server versions, as well as the Zulip API changelog.

  • Our primary official domain is now zulip.com, not zulipchat.com.

Upgrade notes for 3.0

  • Logged in users will be logged out during this one-time upgrade to transition them to more secure session cookies.

  • This release contains dozens of database migrations, but we don’t anticipate any of them being particularly expensive compared to those in past major releases.

  • Previous versions had a rare bug that made it possible to create two user accounts with the same email address, preventing either from logging in. A migration in this release adds a database constraint that will fix this bug. The new migration will fail if any such duplicate accounts already exist; you can check whether this will happen be running the following in a management shell:

    from django.db.models.functions import Lower
UserProfile.objects.all().annotate(email_lower=Lower("delivery_email"))
    .values('realm_id', 'email_lower').annotate(Count('id')).filter(id__count__gte=2)

    If the command returns any accounts, you need to address the duplicate accounts before upgrading. Zulip Cloud only had two accounts affected by this bug, so we expect the vast majority of installations will have none.

  • This release switches Zulip to install PostgreSQL 12 from the upstream PostgreSQL repository by default, rather than using the default PostgreSQL version included with the operating system. Existing Zulip installations will continue to work with PostgreSQL 10; this detail is configured in /etc/zulip/zulip.conf. We have no concrete plans to start requiring PostgreSQL 12, though we do expect it to improve performance. Installations that would like to upgrade can follow our new PostgreSQL upgrade guide.

  • The format of the JWT_AUTH_KEYS setting has changed to include an algorithms list: {"subdomain": "key"} becomes {"subdomain": {"key": "key", "algorithms": ["HS256"]}}.

  • Added a new organization owner permission above the previous organization administrator. All existing organization administrators are automatically converted into organization owners. Certain sensitive administrative settings are now only editable by organization owners.

  • The changelog now has a section that makes it easy to find the Upgrade notes for all releases one is upgrading across.

Full feature changelog

  • Added new options in “Manage streams” to sort by stream activity or number of subscribers.

  • Added new options to control whether the incoming email integration prefers converting the plain text or HTML content of an email.

  • Added server support for creating an account from mobile/terminal apps.

  • The Zulip desktop apps now do social authentication (Google, GitHub, etc.) via an external browser.

  • Added support for BigBlueButton as video chat provider.

  • Added support for setting an organization-wide default language for code blocks.

  • Added an API endpoint for fetching a single user.

  • Added built-in rate limiting for password authentication attempts.

  • Added data export/import support for organization logo and icon.

  • Added documentation for several more API endpoints.

  • Added new email address visibility option hiding real email addresses from organization administrators in the Zulip UI.

  • Added new “Mention time” Markdown feature to communicate about times in a time-zone-aware fashion.

  • Added new “Spoiler” Markdown feature to hide text until interaction.

  • Added a new API that allows the mobile/desktop/terminal apps to open uploaded files in an external browser that may not be logged in.

  • Added several database indexes that significantly improve performance of common queries.

  • Added an organization setting to disable the compose box video call feature.

  • Added a user setting to disable sharing one’s presence information with other users.

  • Added support for IdP-initiated SSO in the SAML authentication backend.

  • Added new “messages sent over time” graph on /stats.

  • Added support for restricting SAML authentication to only some Zulip organizations.

  • Added List-Id header to outgoing emails for simpler client filtering.

  • Changed how avatar URLs are sent to clients to dramatically improve network performance in organizations with 10,000s of user accounts.

  • Redesigned all of our avatar/image upload widgets to have a cleaner, simpler interface.

  • Normal users can now see invitations they sent via organization settings.

  • Rewrote the Zoom video call integration.

  • Polished numerous subtle elements of Zulip’s visual design.

  • Dramatically improved the scalability of Zulip’s server-to-client push system, improving throughput by a factor of ~4.

  • Improved handling of GitHub accounts with several email addresses.

  • Improved “Manage streams” UI to clearly identify personal settings and use pills for adding new subscribers.

  • Improved Sentry, Taiga, GitHub, GitLab, Semaphore, and many other integrations.

  • Improved “Muted topics” UI to show when a topic was muted.

  • Improved the UI for “Drafts” and “Message edit history” widgets.

  • Improved left sidebar popovers to clearly identify administrative actions.

  • Rewrote substantial parts of the Zulip installer to be more robust.

  • Replaced the chevron menu indicators in sidebars with vertical ellipses.

  • Removed the right sidebar “Group PMs” widget. It’s functionality is available in the left sidebar “Private messages” widget.

  • Removed the Google Hangouts integration, due to Google’s support for it being discontinued.

  • Removed a limitation on editing topics of messages more than a week old.

  • The Gitter data import tool now supports importing multiple Gitter rooms into a single Zulip organization.

  • Missed-message emails and various onboarding content are now tagged for translation.

  • Redesigned the notice about large numbers of unread messages to be a banner (no longer a modal) and to use a better trigger.

  • Cleaned up dozens of irregularities in how the Zulip API formats data when returning it to clients.

  • Extended stream-level settings for who can post to a stream.

  • Extended GET /messages API to support a more intuitive way to request the first unread or latest message as the anchor.

  • Muted topics will now only appear behind “more topics”.

  • Improved UI for picking which streams to invite new users to.

  • Improved UI for reviewing one’s muted topics.

  • Improved UI for message edit history.

  • Fixed many minor issues with Zulip’s Markdown processors.

  • Fixed many subtle issues with the message editing UI.

  • Fixed several subtle issues with the default nginx configuration.

  • Fixed minor issues with various keyboard shortcuts.

  • Fixed UI bugs with Zulip’s image lightbox.

  • Specifying latex or text as the language for a code block now does LaTeX syntax highlighting (math remains the recommended code block language to render LaTeX syntax into display math).

  • Fixed performance problems when adding subscribers in organizations with thousands of streams.

  • Fixed performance issues with typeahead and presence in organizations with 10,000s of total users.

  • Fixed guest users being added to the notifications stream unconditionally.

  • Fixed inconsistencies in the APIs for fetching users and streams.

  • Fixed several subtle bugs with local echo in rare race conditions.

  • Fixed a subtle race that could result in semi-duplicate emoji reactions.

  • Fixed subtle click-handler bugs with the mobile web UI.

  • Improved defaults to avoid OOM kills on low RAM servers when running expensive tools like webpack or Slack import.

  • Added loading indicators for scrolling downwards and fixed several subtle bugs with the message feed discovered as a result.

  • Added a migration to fix invalid analytics data resulting from a missing unique constraint (and then add the constraint).

  • Dramatically simplified the process for adding a new authentication backend.

  • Added webhook support for AnsibleTower 9.x.y.

  • Essentially rewrote our API documentation using the OpenAPI format, with extensive validation to ensure its accuracy as we modify the API.

  • Removed New User Bot and Feedback Bot. Messages they had sent are migrated to have been sent by Notification Bot.

  • Removed the “pointer” message ID from Zulip, a legacy concept dating to 2012 that predated tracking unread messages in Zulip and has largely resulted in unexpected behavior for the last few years.

  • Reduced visual size of emoji in message bodies for a cleaner look.

  • Replaced file upload frontend with one supporting chunked upload. We expect this to enable uploading much larger files using Zulip in future releases.

  • Improved error messages when trying to invite a user with an existing, deactivated, account.

  • Improved server logging format to refer to users with userid@subdomain rather than referencing email addresses.

  • Improved warnings when sending wildcard mentions to large streams.

  • Migrated the frontend codebase to use native ES6 data structures.

  • Migrated settings for notifications streams to our standard UX model.

  • Various security hardening changes suggested by the PySA static analyzer.

  • Modernized the codebase to use many Python 3.6 and ES6 patterns.

  • Integrated isort, a tool which ensures that our Python codebase has clean, sorted import statements.

  • Integrated PySA, a tool for detecting security bugs in Python codebases using the type-checker.

  • Integrated semgrep, and migrated several regular expression based linter rules to use its Python syntax-aware parser.

  • Added tooling to automatically generate all screenshots in integration docs.

  • Restructured the backend for Zulip’s system administrator level settings system to be more maintainable.

  • This release largely completes the SCSS refactoring of the codebase.

  • Replaced our CasperJS frontend integration test system with Puppeteer.

  • Extracted the typeahead and Markdown libraries for reuse in the mobile apps.

  • Removed the legacy websockets-based system for sending messages. This system was always a hack, was only ever used for one endpoint, and did not provide a measurable latency benefit over HTTP/2.

Zulip 2.1.x series

2.1.8 – 2021-08-11

  • Fixed possible 0257_fix_has_link_attribute.py database migration failure, which would cause errors during the upgrade process.

2.1.7 – 2020-06-25

  • CVE-2020-15070: Fix privilege escalation vulnerability with custom profile fields and direct write access to Zulip’s PostgreSQL database.

  • Changed default memcached authentication username to zulip@localhost, fixing authentication problems when servers change their hostname.

2.1.6 – 2020-06-17

  • Fixed use of Python 3.6+ syntax in 2.1.5 release that prevented installation on Ubuntu 16.04.

2.1.5 – 2020-06-16

  • CVE-2020-12759: Fix reflected XSS vulnerability in Dropbox webhook.

  • CVE-2020-14194: Prevent reverse tabnapping via topic header links.

  • CVE-2020-14215: Fixed use of invitation role data from expired invitations on signup via external authentication methods.

  • CVE-2020-14215: Fixed buggy 0198_preregistrationuser_invited_as database migration from the 2.0.0-rc1 release, which incorrectly added the administrator role to invitations.

  • CVE-2020-14215: Added migration to clear the administrator role from any invitation objects already corrupted by the buggy version of the 0198_preregistrationuser_invited_as migration.

  • Fixed missing quoting of certain attributes in HTML templates.

  • Allow /etc/zulip to be a symlink (for docker-zulip).

  • Disabled access from insecure Zulip Desktop releases below version 5.2.0.

  • Adjusted Slack import documentation to help administrators avoid OOM kills when doing Slack import on low-RAM systems.

  • Fixed a race condition fetching users’ personal API keys.

  • Fixed a few bugs with Slack data import.

Upgrade notes for 2.1.5

Administrators of servers originally installed with Zulip 1.9 or older should audit for unexpected organization administrators following this upgrade, as it is possible CVE-2020-14215 caused a user to incorrectly join as an organization administrator in the past. See the release blog post for details.

2.1.4 – 2020-04-16

  • Fixed a regression in 2.1.3 that impacted creating the very first organization via our data import tools.

  • Remove the old tsearch_extras PostgreSQL extension, which was causing an exception restoring backups on fresh Zulip servers that had been generated on systems that had been upgraded from older Zulip releases.

  • Removed fetching GitHub contributor data from static asset build process. This makes upgrade-zulip-from-git much more reliable.

  • Updated translation data from Transifex.

  • Support for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and Debian 9 Stretch is now deprecated.

2.1.3 – 2020-04-01

  • CVE-2020-9444: Prevent reverse tabnapping attacks.

  • CVE-2020-9445: Remove unused and insecure modal_link feature.

  • CVE-2020-10935: Fix XSS vulnerability in local link rewriting.

  • Blocked access from Zulip Desktop versions below 5.0.0. This behavior can be adjusted by editing DESKTOP_*_VERSION in /home/zulip/deployments/current/version.py.

  • Restructured server initialization to simplify initialization of Docker containers (eliminating common classes of user error).

  • Removed buggy feedback bot (ENABLE_FEEDBACK).

  • Migrated GitHub authentication to use the current encoding.

  • Fixed support for restoring a backup on a different minor release (in the common case they have the same database schema).

  • Fixed restoring backups with memcached authentication enabled.

  • Fixed preview content (preheaders) for many emails.

  • Fixed buggy text in missed-message emails with PM content disabled.

  • Fixed buggy loading spinner in “emoji format” widget.

  • Fixed sorting and filtering users in organization settings.

  • Fixed handling of links to deleted streams.

  • Fixed check-rabbitmq-consumers monitoring.

  • Fixed copy-to-clipboard button for outgoing webhook bots.

  • Fixed logging spam from soft_deactivation cron job.

  • Fixed email integration handling of emails with nested MIME structure.

  • Fixed Unicode bugs in incoming email integration.

  • Fixed error handling for Slack data import.

  • Fixed incoming webhook support for AWX 9.x.y.

  • Fixed a couple missing translation tags.

  • Fixed “User groups” settings UI bug for administrators.

  • Fixed data import tool to reset resource limits after importing data from a free plan organization on zulip.com.

  • Changed the SAML default signature algorithm to SHA-256, overriding the SHA-1 default used by python3-saml.

2.1.2 – 2020-01-16

  • Corrected fix for CVE-2019-19775 (the original fix was affected by an unfixed security bug in Python’s urllib, CVE-2015-2104).

  • Migrated data for handling replies to missed-message emails from semi-persistent Redis to the fully persistent database.

  • Added authentication for Redis and memcached even in configurations where these are running on localhost, for add hardening against attacks from malicious processes running on the Zulip server.

  • Improved logging for misconfigurations of LDAP authentication.

  • Improved error handling for invalid LDAP configurations.

  • Improved error tracebacks for invalid memcached keys.

  • Fixed support for using LDAP with email address visibility limited to administrators.

  • Fixed styling of complex markup within /me messages.

  • Fixed left sidebar duplicating some group private message threads.

  • Fixed the “Mentions” narrow being unable to mark messages as read.

  • Fixed error handling bug preventing rerunning the installer.

  • Fixed a few minor issues with migrations for upgrading from 2.0.x.

2.1.1 – 2019-12-13

  • Fixed upgrading to 2.1.x with the LDAP integration enabled in a configuration where AUTH_LDAP_REVERSE_EMAIL_SEARCH is newly required, but is not yet set.

  • Reimplemented --postgres-missing-dictionaries installer option, used with our new support for a DBaaS managed database.

  • Improved documentation for AUTH_LDAP_REVERSE_EMAIL_SEARCH.

2.1.0 – 2019-12-12

Highlights

  • Added support for Debian 10. Removed support for EOL Ubuntu 14.04.

  • Added support for SAML authentication.

  • Removed our dependency on tsearch_extras, making it possible to run a production Zulip server against any PostgreSQL database (including those where one cannot install extensions, like Amazon RDS).

  • Significantly improved the email->Zulip gateway, and added nice setup documentation. It now should be possible to subscribe a Zulip stream to an email list and have a good experience.

  • Added an option for hiding access to user email addresses from other users. While counterproductive for most corporate communities, for open source projects and other volunteer organizations, this can be a critical anti-spam feature.

  • Added a new setting controlling which unread messages are counted in the favicon, title, and desktop app.

  • Support for showing inline previews of linked webpages has moved from alpha to beta. See the upgrade notes below for some changes in how it is configured.

  • Added support for importing an organization from Mattermost (similar to existing Slack/HipChat/Gitter import tools). Slack import now supports importing data only included in corporate exports, including private messages and shared channels.

  • Added Markdown support and typeahead for mentioning topics.

  • Email notifications have been completely redesigned with a minimal, readable style inspired by GitHub’s email notifications.

  • We merged significant preparatory work for supporting RHEL/CentOS in production. We’re now interested in beta testers for this feature.

  • Reorganized Zulip’s documentation for sysadmins, and added new documentation on maintaining a fork of Zulip.

  • Added new streams:public search operator that searches the public history of all streams in the organization (even before you joined).

  • Added support for sending email and mobile push notifications for wildcard mentions (@all and @everyone). Previously, they only triggered desktop notifications; now, that’s configurable.

Upgrade notes for 2.1.0

  • The defaults for Zulip’s now beta inline URL preview setting have changed. Previously, the server-level INLINE_URL_EMBED_PREVIEW setting was disabled, and organization-level setting was enabled. Now, the server-level setting is enabled by default, and the organization-level setting is disabled. As a result, organization administrators can configure this feature entirely in the UI. However, servers that had previously enabled previews of linked websites will lose the setting and need to re-enable it.

  • We rewrote the Google authentication backend to use the python-social-auth system we use for other third-party authentication systems. For this release, the old variable names still work, but users should update the following setting names in their configuration as we will desupport the old names in a future release:

    • In /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf, google_oauth2_client_secret is now called with social_auth_google_secret.

    • In /etc/zulip/settings.py, GOOGLE_OAUTH2_CLIENT_ID should be replaced with SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_KEY.

    • In /etc/zulip/settings.py, GoogleMobileOauth2Backend should be replaced with called GoogleAuthBackend.

  • Installations using Zulip’s LDAP integration without LDAP_APPEND_DOMAIN will need to configure two new settings telling Zulip how to look up a user in LDAP given their email address: AUTH_LDAP_REVERSE_EMAIL_SEARCH and AUTH_LDAP_USERNAME_ATTR. See the LDAP configuration instructions for details. You can use the usual manage.py query_ldap method to verify whether your configuration is working correctly.

  • The Zulip web and desktop apps have been converted to directly count all unread messages, replacing an old system that just counted the (recent) messages fully fetched by the web app. This one-time transition may cause some users to notice old messages that were sent months or years ago “just became unread”. What actually happened is the user never read these messages, and the Zulip web app was not displaying that. Generally, the fix is for users to simply mark those messages as read as usual.

  • Previous versions of Zulip’s installer would generate the secrets local_database_password and initial_password_salt. These secrets don’t do anything, as they only modify behavior of a Zulip development environment. We recommend deleting those lines from /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf when you upgrade to avoid confusion.

  • This release has a particularly expensive database migration, changing the UserMessage.id field from an int to a bigint to support more than 2 billion message deliveries on a Zulip server. It runs in 2 phases: A first migration that doesn’t require the server to be down (which took about 4 hours to process the 250M rows on chat.zulip.org, and a second migration that does require downtime (which took about 60 seconds for chat.zulip.org). You can check the number of rows for your server with UserMessage.objects.count().

    We expect that most Zulip servers can happily just use the normal upgrade process with a few minutes of downtime. Zulip servers with over 1M messages may want to first upgrade to this commit using upgrade-zulip-from-git, following the instructions to avoid downtime, and then upgrade to the new release.

Full feature changelog

  • Added sortable columns to all tables in settings pages.

  • Added web app support for self-service public data exports.

  • Added ‘e’ keyboard shortcut for editing currently selected message.

  • Added support for unstarring all starred messages.

  • Added support for using | as an OR operator in sidebar search features.

  • Added direct download links for Android APKs to our /apps page.

  • Added a responsive design for our /integrations/ pages.

  • Added typeahead for slash commands.

  • Added more expansive moderation settings for who can create streams, edit user groups, or invite other users to join streams.

  • Added new Bitbucket Server, Buildbot, Harbor, Gitea and Redmine integrations.

  • Added proper open graph tags for linking to a Zulip organization.

  • Added organization setting to disable users uploading new avatars (for use with LDAP synchronization).

  • Added support for completely disabling the file upload feature.

  • Added a new “external account” custom profile field type, making it convenient to link to profiles on GitHub, Twitter, and other tools.

  • Added support for choosing which email address to use in GitHub auth.

  • Added a new setting to control whether inactive streams are demoted.

  • Added web app support for new desktop app features: inline reply from notifications, and detecting user presence from OS APIs.

  • Added Markdown support for headings, implemented using # heading, and removed several other unnecessary differences from CommonMark.

  • Added local echo when editing messages for a more responsive experience.

  • Changes to global notification settings for stream messages now affect existing subscriptions where the user had not explicitly changed the notification settings, as expected.

  • The default setting value is now to send mobile push notifications if the user was recently online.

  • Fixed issues with positioning and marking messages as read when doing a search where some results are unread messages.

  • The private messages widget shows much deeper history of private message conversations in a scrollable widget (1K PMs of history).

  • When there are dozens of unread topics, topic lists in the left sidebar now show at most 8 topics, with the rest behind “more topics”.

  • New users now see their most recent 20 messages as unread, to provide a better onboarding experience.

  • Redesigned the in-app “keyboard shortcuts” popover to be more usable.

  • Redesigned the interactions on several settings pages.

  • Significantly improved the visual spacing around bulleted lists, blockquotes, and code blocks in Zulip’s message feed.

  • Extended buttons to visit links in topics to all URLs, not just URLs added by a linkifier.

  • Extended several integrations to cover more events and fix bugs, and rewrote formatting for dozens of integraitons for cleaner punctuation.

  • The beta “weekly digest emails” feature is again available as an organization-level configuration option, after several improvements.

  • The administrative UI for managing bots now nicely links to the bot’s owner.

  • Restructured “private messages” widget to have a cleaner design.

  • Significantly improved performance of the backend Markdown processor.

  • Significantly improved Help Center documentation of dozens of features.

  • Simplified and internationalized some notification bot messages.

  • The compose box placeholder now shows users active status.

  • Clicking the “EDITED” text on a message now pops message edit history.

  • Adjusted the default streams in new realms to be easier to understand for new users.

  • Improved default nginx TLS settings for stronger security.

  • Improved UI of administrative user management UI.

  • Improved error messages for various classes of invalid searches.

  • Improved styling of both Markdown unordered and numbered lists.

  • Compose typeahead now autofills stream field if only subscribed to one stream.

  • Bot users can now post to announcement-only streams if their owners can (this preserves the pre-existing security model).

  • User full names now must use characters valid in an email from line.

  • Settings pages that normal users cannot modify are now hidden by default.

  • The has:link, has:attachment, and has:image search keywords have been redesigned to correctly handle corner cases like links in code blocks.

  • Replaced title attributes with nice tooltips in the message feed and buddy list.

  • Fixed incorrect caching settings for the Zulip API, which could result in browsers appearing to display old content or remark messages unread.

  • Fixed a bug that prevented sending mobile push notifications when the user was recently online via the mobile app.

  • Fixed buggy handling of LaTeX in quote-and-reply.

  • Fixed buggy rendering of bulleted lists inside blockquotes.

  • Fixed several bugs with CORS in the nginx configuration.

  • Fixed error message for GitHub login attempts with a deactivated account.

  • Fixed email gateway issues with non-Latin characters in stream names.

  • Fixed endless re-synchronization of LDAP user avatars (which could cause user-visible performance issues for desktop/web clients).

  • Fixed all known bugs with advanced LDAP data synchronization.

  • Fixed numbered list handling of blank lines between blocks.

  • Fixed performance issues that made users soft-deactivated for over a year unable to return to the app.

  • Fixed missing -X GET/POST parameters in API docs curl examples. The API documentation for curl examples is now automatically generated with automated tests for the examples to prevent future similar bugs.

  • Fixed multi-line /me messages only working for the sender.

  • Fixed password strength meter not updating on paste.

  • Fixed numerous errors and omissions in the API documentation. Added a test suite comparing the API documentation to the implementation.

  • Fixed copy/paste of blocks of messages in Firefox.

  • Fixed problems with exception reporting when memcached is down.

  • Fixed pinned streams being incorrectly displayed as inactive.

  • Fixed password reset page CSS for desktop app.

  • Fixed “more topics” appearing for new streams, where we can be confident we already have all the topics cached in the browser.

  • Fixed some subtle bugs with event queues and message editing.

  • Fixed real-time sync for reactions and message edits on a message sent to a private stream with shared history before the current user joined that stream.

  • Fixed several subtle real-time sync issues with “stream settings”.

  • Fixed a few subtle Markdown processor bugs involving emoji.

  • Fixed several issues where linkifiers validation was overly restrictive.

  • Fixed several rare/minor UI consistency issues in the left sidebar.

  • Fixed issues involving saving a message edit before file upload completes.

  • Fixed issues with pasting images into the compose box from Safari.

  • Fixed email gateway bot being created with incorrectly cached permissions.

  • Fixed guest users seeing UI widgets they can’t use.

  • Fixed several issues with click handlers incorrectly closing compose.

  • Fixed buggy behavior of /me messages not ending with a paragraph.

  • Fixed several major UI issues with the mobile web app.

  • Fixed HTML styling when copy-pasting content out of Zulip’s night theme.

  • Fixed obscure traceback with Virtualenv 16.0.0 unexpectedly installed.

  • Added a new visual tool for testing webhook integrations.

  • Rewrote the Google authentication backend to use python-social-auth, removing Zulip’s original 2013-era SSO authentication backend.

  • The /server_settings API now advertises supported authentication methods alongside details on how to render login/registration buttons.

  • Rewrote HTML/CSS markup for various core components to be more easily modified.

  • Removed the legacy static asset pipeline; everything now uses webpack.

  • Renamed the system bot Zulip realm to “zulipinternal” (was “zulip”).

  • Switched our scrollbars to use simplebar, fixing many subtle scrollbar-related bugs in the process.

  • Enabled webpack code splitting and deduplication.

  • Started migrating our frontend codebase to TypeScript.

Zulip 2.0.x series

2.0.8 – 2019-12-12

  • CVE-2019-19775: Close open redirect in thumbnail view.

2.0.7 – 2019-11-21

  • CVE-2019-18933: Fix insecure account creation via social authentication.

  • Added backend enforcement of zxcvbn password strength checks.

2.0.6 – 2019-09-23

  • Updated signing keys for the PGroonga repository for Debian 9.

  • Fixed creation of linkifiers with URLs containing &.

  • Fixed a subtle bug that could cause the message list to suddenly scroll up in certain rare race conditions.

2.0.5 – 2019-09-11

  • CVE-2019-16215: Fix DoS vulnerability in Markdown LINK_RE.

  • CVE-2019-16216: Fix MIME type validation.

  • Fixed email gateway postfix configuration for Ubuntu 18.04.

  • Fixed support for hidden_by_limit messages in Slack import.

  • Fixed confusing output from the knight management command.

2.0.4 – 2019-06-29

  • Fixed several configuration-dependent bugs that caused restore-backup to crash.

  • Fixed a table layout bug in “deactivated users” settings.

  • Fixed an exception when administrators edited bot users when custom profile fields were configured in the organization.

  • Fixed a bug enabling the PGRoonga search backend with older PostgreSQL.

  • Fixed getting personal API key when passwords are disabled.

2.0.3 – 2019-04-23

  • Added documentation for upgrading the underlying OS version.

  • Made uwsgi buffer size configurable (relevant for sites putting Zulip behind a proxy that adds many HTTP headers).

  • Fixed loss of LaTeX syntax inside quote-and-reply.

  • Fixed virtualenv-related bug when upgrading Zulip when the system virtualenv package is 16.0.0 or newer (no supported platform has such a version by default, but one can install it manually).

  • Fixed manage.py query_ldap test tool (broken in 2.0.2).

  • Fixed several bugs in new backup and restore tools.

  • Fixed minor bugs with YouTube previews.

2.0.2 – 2019-03-15

  • Fixed a regression in the Puppet configuration for S3 upload backend introduced in 2.0.1.

  • Fixed a too-fast fade for “Saved” in organization settings.

  • Fixed a white flash when loading a browser in night mode.

  • Fixed a few bugs in new LDAP synchronization features.

  • Fixed a buggy validator for custom stream colors.

  • Fixed a confusing “Subscribe” button appearing for guest users.

  • Updated translations, including a new Italian translation.

2.0.1 – 2019-03-04

  • Fixed handling of uploaded file routing on Ubuntu 14.04.

  • Fixed buggy behavior of branding logos in night theme.

  • Fixed handling of deployment directories being owned by root.

  • The styling of “unavailable” status icons is now less prominent.

  • The “deactivated realm” error page now auto-refreshes, to handle realm reactivation.

  • Updated documentation to avoid recommending realm deactivation as a preferred approach to prepare for backups.

  • Added support for using multiple organizations with same LDAP backend configuration.

2.0.0 – 2019-03-01

Highlights

  • Added automation for synchronizing user avatars, custom profile fields, disabled status, and more from LDAP/active directory.

  • Added support for explicitly setting oneself as “away” and “user status” messages.

  • Added a built-in /poll slash command for lightweight polls.

  • Added experimental support for using Zoom as the video chat provider. We now support Jitsi, Google Hangouts, and Zoom.

  • Added support for branding the top-left corner of the logged in app with an organization’s logo.

  • Zulip’s “Guest users” feature is no longer experimental.

  • The HipChat/Stride data import tool is no longer experimental. Our HipChat and Slack import tools are now well-tested with millions of messages, 10,000s of users, and 100,000s of uploaded files.

  • Added a built-in tool for backups and restoration.

  • Deprecated support for Ubuntu 14.04. Zulip 2.0.x will continue to support Ubuntu 14.04, but Zulip 2.1.0 will remove support for installing on Ubuntu 14.04.

Upgrade notes for 2.0.0

  • This release adds support for submitting basic usage statistics to help the Zulip core team. This feature can be enabled only if a server is using the Mobile Push Notification Service, and is enabled by default in that case. To disable it, set SUBMIT_USAGE_STATISTICS = False in /etc/zulip/settings.py.

Full feature changelog

  • Added support for CentOS 7 in the development environment provisioning process. This is an important step towards production CentOS/RHEL 7 support.

  • Added a new invitation workflow with reusable links.

  • Added a new Azure Active Directory authentication integration. New authentication backends supported by python-social-auth can now be added with just a few dozen lines of code.

  • Added API documentation for user groups and custom emoji.

  • Administrators can now easily delete a topic.

  • Added display of a user’s role (administrator, guest, etc.) in various relevant places.

  • Added support for sending “topic” rather than the legacy “subject” for the topic in most API endpoints.

  • Added helpful notifications for some common webhook misconfigurations.

  • Added organization setting to control whether users are allowed to include message content in missed-message emails (for compliance).

  • Added an automated notification when streams are renamed.

  • Added support for changing the default notification sound.

  • Added Ctrl+. shortcut for narrowing to current compose recipient.

  • Added icons to indicate which “organization settings” tabs are available to regular users.

  • Added a tool for migrating from S3 to the local file uploads backend.

  • Added protocol for communicating version incompatibility to mobile apps.

  • Added support for copying avatar and other profile data when creating a second account on a Zulip server with a given email address.

  • Added /digest endpoint for viewing the current digest email on the web.

  • Added alert for when a user sends a message when scrolled too far up.

  • Added internationalization for outgoing emails.

  • Added a Review Board integration, and improved numerous existing integrations.

  • Added support for multi-line messages for the /me feature.

  • Added Markdown rendering of text when displaying custom profile fields.

  • Added “silent mentions” syntax (@_**Tim Abbott**), which show visually, but don’t trigger a notification to the target user.

  • Added support for using lightbox in compose preview.

  • Changes in date no longer force a repeated recipient bar. This fixes a common source of confusion for new users.

  • Suppressed notifications when quoting a message mentioning yourself.

  • Message editing now has the compose widgets for emoji, video calls, etc.

  • Message editing now has a Markdown preview feature just like compose.

  • Message editing now uses same “Enter-sends” behavior as compose.

  • Organization administrators can now edit users’ custom profile fields.

  • Optimized performance of data import from Slack, HipChat, etc.

  • Improved “new user” emails to clearly indicator login details.

  • Improved the UI for “drafts” and “message edit history”.

  • Improved linkifier handling of languages with character alphabets.

  • Improved accessibility of emoji rendering in messages bodies.

  • Eliminated UI lag when using “Quote and reply”.

  • Expanded production documentation for more unusual deployment options.

  • Expanded set of characters allowed in custom linkifiers.

  • Optimized development provisioning; now takes 2s in the no-op case.

  • Zulip’s Help Center now has nicely generated open graph tags.

  • Fixed missing API authentication headers for mobile file access.

  • Fixed various select and copy-paste issues.

  • Fixed various back button bugs in settings UI.

  • Fixed various mobile web visual issues.

  • Fixed unnecessary resizing of animated custom emoji.

  • Fixed several performance issues for organizations with 1000s of streams.

  • Fixed various error handling bugs sending push notifications.

  • Fixed handling of diacritics in user-mention typeahead.

  • Fixed several bugs with importing data into Zulip’s S3 backend.

  • Fixed display of full recipients list in “private messages” hover.

  • Fixed bugs involving muting and renamed streams.

  • Fixed soft-deactivation performance issues with many thousands of users.

  • Countless behind-the-scenes improvements to Zulip’s codebase, tooling, automated tests, error handling, and APIs.

Zulip 1.9.x series

1.9.2 – 2019-01-29

This release migrates Zulip off a deprecated Google+ API (necessary for Google authentication to continue working past March 7), and contains a few bug fixes for the installer and Slack import. It has minimal changes for existing servers not using Google authentication.

  • Updated the Google auth integration to stop using a deprecated and soon-to-be-removed Google+ authentication API.

  • Improved installer error messages for common configuration problems.

  • Fixed several bugs in Slack, Gitter, and HipChat import tools.

  • Fixed a subtle bug in garbage-collection of the node_modules cache.

  • Optimized performance of Slack import for organizations with thousands of users.

1.9.1 – 2018-11-30

This release is primarily intended to improve the experience for new Zulip installations; it has minimal changes for existing servers.

  • Added support for getting multi-domain certificates with setup-certbot.

  • Improved various installer error messages and sections of the installation documentation to help avoid for common mistakes.

  • The Google auth integration now always offers an account chooser.

  • Fixed buggy handling of avatars in Slack import.

  • Fixed nginx configuration for mobile API authentication to access uploads.

  • Updated translation data, including significant new Italian strings.

1.9.0 – 2018-11-07

Highlights

  • Support for Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 9 (our first non-Ubuntu platform!). We expect to deprecate support for installing a new Zulip server on Ubuntu 14.04 in the coming months, in preparation for Ubuntu 14.04’s end-of-life in April 2019.

  • New data import tools for HipChat and Gitter. The Slack importer is now out of beta.

  • Zulip Python process startup time is about 30% faster; this effort resulted in upstream contributions to fix significant performance bugs in django-bitfield, libthumbor, and pika.

  • You can now configure custom (organization-specific) fields for user profiles; Zulip can now serve as your organization’s employee directory.

  • Zulip now supports using Google Hangouts instead of Jitsi as the video chat provider.

  • Users can now configure email and mobile push notifications for all messages in a stream (useful for low-traffic streams/organizations), not just for messages mentioning them.

  • New stream settings control whether private stream subscribers can access history from before they joined, and allow configuring streams to only allow administrators to post.

  • Zulip now has experimental support for guest users (intended for use cases like contractors who the organization only wants to have access to a few streams).

  • New native integrations for Ansible Tower, Appveyor, Clubhouse, Netlify, and Zabbix; Zulip now has over 100 native integrations (in addition to hundreds more available via Zapier and IFTTT).

  • New translations for Ukrainian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Dutch, and Finnish. Zulip now has complete or nearly-complete translations for German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Finnish, and Turkish. Partial translations for Chinese, Dutch, Korean, Polish, Japanese, and Indonesian cover the majority of the total strings in the project.

Upgrade notes for 1.9.0

  • Zulip 1.9 contains a significant database migration that can take several minutes to run. The upgrade process automatically minimizes disruption by running this migration first, before beginning the user-facing downtime. However, if you’d like to watch the downtime phase of the upgrade closely, we recommend running them first manually as well as the usual trick of doing an apt upgrade first.

Full feature changelog

  • Added an organization setting for message deletion time limits.

  • Added an organization setting to control who can edit topics.

  • Added Ctrl+K keyboard shortcut for getting to search (same as /, but works even when you’re inside compose).

  • Renamed the hotkey for starring a message to Ctrl+S.

  • Added the new SOCIAL_AUTH_SUBDOMAIN setting, which all servers using both GitHub authentication and hosting multiple Zulip organizations should set (see the docs for details).

  • Added automatic thumbnailing of images, powered by thumbor. The new THUMBOR_URL setting controls this feature; it is disabled by default in this release, because the mobile apps don’t support it yet.

  • Added documentation on alternative production deployment options.

  • Added Gitter and HipChat data import tools.

  • Added support for using both LDAPAuthBackend and EmailAuthBackend.

  • Added support for rendering message content written in right-to-left languages in a right-to-left style.

  • Added support for compose keyboard shortcuts in message edit UI.

  • Added a fast database index supporting the “Private messages” narrow.

  • Added a notification setting for whether to send “new login” emails.

  • Dramatically expanded our API documentation to cover many more endpoints.

  • Optimized the performance of loading Zulip in an organization with thousands of users and hundreds of bot users.

  • Optimized production release tarballs to save about 40MB of size.

  • Dropped support for the EmojiOne and Apple emoji sets, and added support for the Google modern emoji set.

  • Removed the “Delete streams” administration page; one can delete streams directly on “Manage streams”.

  • Removed support code for the (long-deprecated) legacy desktop app.

  • Fixed several bugs with progress bars when uploading files.

  • Fixed several bugs in manage.py register_server.

  • Fixed several minor real-time sync issues with stream settings.

  • Fixed some tricky corner cases with the web app’s caching model and narrowing to the first unread message.

  • Fixed confusing intermediate states of group PMs online indicators.

  • Fixed several subtle unread count corner case bugs.

  • Fixed several installer issues to make it easier to Dockerize Zulip.

  • Fixed several subtle issues with both the LDAP/Active Directory integration and its documentation, making it much easier to set up.

  • Fixed several minor bugs and otherwise optimized search typeahead.

  • Fixed a bad nginx configuration interaction with servers that have misconfigured IPv6.

  • Fixed most of the caveats on the Slack data import tool.

  • Fixed memcached cache size issues for organizations over 10,000 users.

  • Zulip’s data export system has full support for all features, and tests to ensure that it stays that way.

  • Rewrote user documentation for dozens of integrations.

  • Rewrote the GitHub authentication backend (and more generally our python-social-auth integration) to make it easier to add new auth methods.

  • Upgraded to modern versions of most of our stale dependencies.

  • Updated our CSS toolchain to support hot module reloading.

  • Updated numerous pages within the /help/ site.

  • We no longer require re-authing to sign up after trying to log in with an OAuth authentication backend (GitHub or Google).

  • Made major improvements to the Help Center.

  • Improved system for configuring the S3 file uploads backend.

  • Improved emoji typeahead sorting.

  • Improved Zulip’s layout for windows with a width around 1024px.

  • Improved Zulip’s generic error handling behavior for webhooks.

  • Improved keyboard navigation of settings and popovers.

  • Renamed “realm filters” to “linkifiers”, at least in the UI.

  • Converted several layered-checkbox settings to clearer dropdowns.

  • Cleaned up some legacy APIs still using email addresses.

  • Made arrow-key navigation work within right and left sidebar search.

  • Fixed performance issues of the right sidebar user list with 5000+ user accounts on a server.

  • Emails and several other onboarding strings are now tagged for translation.

  • Optimized the performance of importing Zulip by about 30%. This significantly decreases the load spike when restarting a Zulip server.

  • Optimized the performance of development provisioning; a no-op provision now completes in about 3.5s.

  • Migrated our static asset pipeline to webpack.

  • Our steady work on codebase quality and our automated test suite continues. Backend test coverage is now an incredible 98%.

Zulip 1.8.x series

1.8.1 – 2018-05-07

  • Added an automated tool (manage.py register_server) to sign up for the mobile push notifications service.

  • Improved rendering of block quotes in mobile push notifications.

  • Improved some installer error messages.

  • Fixed several minor bugs with the new Slack import feature.

  • Fixed several visual bugs with the new compose input pills.

  • Fixed several minor visual bugs with night mode.

  • Fixed bug with visual clipping of “g” in the left sidebar.

  • Fixed an issue with the LDAP backend users’ Organization Unit (OU) being cached, resulting in trouble logging in after a user was moved between OUs.

  • Fixed a couple subtle bugs with muting.

1.8.0 – 2018-04-17

Highlights

  • Dramatically simplified the server installation process; it’s now possible to install Zulip without first setting up outgoing email.

  • Added experimental support for importing an organization’s history from Slack.

  • Added a new “night mode” theme for dark environments.

  • Added a video call integration powered by Jitsi.

  • Lots of visual polish improvements.

  • Countless small bugfixes both in the backend and the UI.

Security and privacy:

  • Several important security fixes since 1.7.0, which were released already in 1.7.1 and 1.7.2.

  • The security model for private streams has changed. Now organization administrators can remove users, edit descriptions, and rename private streams they are not subscribed to. See Zulip’s security model documentation for details.

  • On Ubuntu 16.04, the local uploads backend now does the same security checks that the S3 backend did before serving files to users. Ubuntu 14.04’s version of nginx is too old to support this and so the legacy model is the default; we recommend upgrading.

  • Added an organization setting to limit creation of bots.

  • Refactored the authentication backends codebase to be much easier to verify.

  • Added a user setting to control whether email notifications include message content (or just the fact that there are new messages).

Visual and UI:

  • Added a user setting to translate emoticons/smileys to emoji.

  • Added a user setting to choose the emoji set used in Zulip: Google, Twitter, Apple, or Emoji One.

  • Expanded setting for displaying emoji as text to cover all display settings (previously only affected reactions).

  • Overhauled our settings system to eliminate the old “save changes” button system.

  • Redesigned the “uploaded files” UI.

  • Redesigned the “account settings” UI.

  • Redesigned error pages for the various email confirmation flows.

  • Our emoji now display at full resolution on retina displays.

  • Improved placement of text when inserting emoji via picker.

  • Improved the descriptions and UI for many settings.

  • Improved visual design of the help center (/help/).

Core chat experience:

  • Added support for mentioning groups of users.

  • Added a setting to allow users to delete their messages.

  • Added support for uploading files in the message-edit UI.

  • Redesigned the compose are for private messages to use pretty pills rather than raw email addresses to display recipients.

  • Added new Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+L compose shortcuts for inserting common syntax.

  • Added warning when linking to a private stream via typeahead.

  • Added support for automatically-numbered Markdown lists.

  • Added a big warning when posting to #announce.

  • Added a notification when drafts are saved, to make them more discoverable.

  • Added a fast local echo to emoji reactions.

  • Messages containing just a link to an image (or an uploaded image) now don’t clutter the feed with the URL: we just display the image.

  • Redesigned the API for emoji reactions to support the full range of how emoji reactions are used.

  • Fixed most of the known (mostly obscure) bugs in how messages are formatted in Zulip.

  • Fixed “more topics” to correctly display all historical topics for public streams, even though from before a user subscribed.

  • Added a menu item to mark all messages as read.

  • Fixed image upload file pickers offering non-image files.

  • Fixed some subtle bugs with full-text search and Unicode.

  • Fixed bugs in the “edit history” HTML rendering process.

  • Fixed popovers being closed when new messages come in.

  • Fixed unexpected code blocks when using the email mirror.

  • Fixed clicking on links to a narrow opening a new window.

  • Fixed several subtle bugs with the email gateway system.

  • Fixed layering issues with mobile Safari.

  • Fixed several obscure real-time synchronization bugs.

  • Fixed handling of messages with a very large HTML rendering.

  • Fixed several bugs around interacting with deactivated users.

  • Fixed interaction bugs with unread counts and deleting messages.

  • Fixed support for replacing deactivated custom emoji.

  • Fixed scrolling downwards in narrows.

  • Optimized how user avatar URLs are transmitted over the wire.

  • Optimized message sending performance a bit more.

  • Fixed a subtle and hard-to-reproduce bug that resulted in every message being condensed ([More] appearing on every message).

  • Improved typeahead’s handling of editing an already-completed mention.

  • Improved syntax for inline LaTeX to be more convenient.

  • Improved syntax for permanent links to streams in Zulip.

  • Improved behavior of copy-pasting a large number of messages.

  • Improved handling of browser undo in compose.

  • Improved saved drafts system to garbage-collect old drafts and sort by last modification, not creation.

  • Removed the legacy “Zulip labs” autoscroll_forever setting. It was enabled mostly by accident.

  • Removed some long-deprecated Markdown syntax for mentions.

  • Added support for clicking on a mention to see a user’s profile.

  • Links to logged-in content in Zulip now take the user to the appropriate upload or view after a user logs in.

  • Renamed “Home” to “All messages”, to avoid users clicking on it too early in using Zulip.

  • Added a user setting to control whether the organization’s name is included in email subject lines.

  • Fixed uploading user avatars encoded using the CMYK mode.

User accounts and invites:

  • Added support for users in multiple realms having the same email.

  • Added a display for whether the user is logged-in in logged-out pages.

  • Added support for inviting a new user as an administrator.

  • Added a new organization settings page for managing invites.

  • Added rate-limiting on inviting users to join a realm (prevents spam).

  • Added an organization setting to disable welcome emails to new users.

  • Added an organization setting to ban disposable email addresses (I.e.. those from sites like mailinator.com).

  • Improved the password reset flow to be less confusing if you don’t have an account.

  • Split the Notifications Stream setting in two settings, one for new users, the other for new streams.

Stream subscriptions and settings:

  • Added traffic statistics (messages/week) to the “Manage streams” UI.

  • Fixed numerous issues in the “stream settings” UI.

  • Fixed numerous subtle bugs with the stream creation UI.

  • Changes the URL scheme for stream narrows to encode the stream ID, so that they can be robust to streams being renamed. The change is backwards-compatible; existing narrow URLs still work.

API, bots, and integrations:

  • Rewrote our API documentation to be much more friendly and expansive; it now covers most important endpoints, with nice examples.

  • New integrations: ErrBot, GoCD, Google Code-In, Opbeat, Groove, Raygun, Insping, Dialogflow, Dropbox, Front, Intercom, Statuspage.io, Flock and Beeminder.

  • Added support for embedded interactive bots.

  • Added inline preview + player for Vimeo videos.

  • Added new event types and fixed bugs in several webhook integrations.

  • Added support for default bots to receive messages when they’re mentioned, even if they are not subscribed.

  • Added support for overriding the topic is all incoming webhook integrations.

  • Incoming webhooks now send a private message to the bot owner for more convenient testing if a stream is not specified.

  • Rewrote documentation for many integrations to use a cleaner numbered-list format.

  • APIs for fetching messages now provide more metadata to help clients.

Keyboard shortcuts:

  • Added new “basics” section to keyboard shortcuts documentation.

  • Added a new “>” keyboard shortcut for quote-and-reply.

  • Added a new “p” keyboard shortcut to jump to next unread PM thread.

  • Fixed several hotkeys scope bugs.

  • Changed the hotkey for compose-private-message from “C” to “x”.

  • Improve keyboard navigation of left and right sidebars with arrow keys.

Mobile apps backend:

  • Added support for logging into the mobile apps with RemoteUserBackend.

  • Improved mobile notifications to support narrowing when one clicks a mobile push notification.

  • Statistics on the fraction of strings that are translated now include strings in the mobile apps as well.

For server admins:

  • Added certbot support to the installer for getting certificates.

  • Added support for hosting multiple domains, not all as subdomains of the same base domain.

  • Added a new nagios check for the Zulip analytics state.

  • Fixed buggy APNs logic that could cause extra exception emails.

  • Fixed a missing dependency for the localhost_sso auth backend.

  • Fixed subtle bugs in garbage-collection of old node_modules versions.

  • Clarified instructions for server settings (especially LDAP auth).

  • Added missing information on requesting user in many exception emails.

  • Improved Tornado retry logic for connecting to RabbitMQ.

  • Added a server setting to control whether digest emails are sent.

For Zulip developers:

  • Migrated the codebase to use the nice Python 3 typing syntax.

  • Added a new /team/ page explaining the team, with a nice visualization of our contributors.

  • Dramatically improved organization of developer docs.

  • Backend test coverage is now 95%.

Upgrade notes for 1.8.0

This major release has no special upgrade notes.

Zulip 1.7.x series

1.7.2 – 2018-04-12

This is a security release, with a handful of cherry-picked changes since 1.7.1. All Zulip server admins are encouraged to upgrade promptly.

  • CVE-2018-9986: Fix XSS issues with frontend Markdown processor.

  • CVE-2018-9987: Fix XSS issue with muting notifications.

  • CVE-2018-9990: Fix XSS issue with stream names in topic typeahead.

  • CVE-2018-9999: Fix XSS issue with user uploads. The fix for this adds a Content-Security-Policy for the LOCAL_UPLOADS_DIR storage backend for user-uploaded files.

Thanks to Suhas Sunil Gaikwad for reporting CVE-2018-9987 and w2w for reporting CVE-2018-9986 and CVE-2018-9990.

1.7.1 – 2017-11-21

This is a security release, with a handful of cherry-picked changes since 1.7.0. All Zulip server admins are encouraged to upgrade promptly.

This release includes fixes for the upgrade process, so server admins running a version from before 1.7 should upgrade directly to 1.7.1.

  • CVE-2017-0910: On a server with multiple realms, a vulnerability in the invitation system allowed an authorized user of one realm to create an account on any other realm.

  • The Korean translation is now complete, a huge advance from almost nothing in 1.7.0. The French translation is now nearly complete, and several other languages have smaller updates.

  • The installer now sets LC_ALL to a known locale, working around an issue where some dependencies fail to install in some locales.

  • We fixed a bug in the script that runs after upgrading Zulip (so the fix applies when upgrading to this version), where the garbage-collection of old deployments sometimes wouldn’t preserve the immediate last deployment.

1.7.0 – 2017-10-25

Highlights

Web

  • We’ve completely redesigned our onboarding process to explain Zulip, and especially topics, to new users.

  • We’ve built a beautiful new emoji picker with categories, a showcase, and much better data. Note the clean, underscore-free display!

  • The emails sent by Zulip are more consistent, readable, and visually interesting.

  • Chinese (Simplified) and Japanese join Spanish, German, and Czech in having the user interface fully translated, in addition to partial translations for many other languages. We also fixed many small issues where strings weren’t tagged for translation.

  • Many pages have been redesigned to be easier to use and visually cleaner, including the settings pages and the user documentation at /help, /integrations, and /apps.

Mobile and Desktop support

  • Zulip Server 1.7 adds several new APIs that are critical for mobile app performance and that let the app track unread messages. If you’re using the mobile apps at all (iOS or Android), you will definitely want to upgrade to Zulip 1.7.

  • The iOS and Android apps can receive push notifications (configurable, naturally) for events like PMs and @-mentions. While Zulip Server 1.6 has basic support for these, 1.7 brings a new, clearer format to notifications, and gives each user more options for finer-grained control.

  • The new Electron desktop app is out of beta and replaces our legacy desktop apps.

Backend and scaling

  • Zulip now runs exclusively on Python 3. This is the culmination of an 18-month migration effort. We are very excited about this!

  • We’ve added an automatic “soft deactivation” process, which dramatically improves performance for organizations with a large number of inactive users, without any impact on those users’ experience if they later come back.

  • Zulip’s performance at scale has improved significantly. Performance now scales primarily with number of active users (not total users). As an example, chat.zulip.org serves 400 monthly active users and about 3500 total users, on one VM with just 8GB of RAM and a CPU consistently over 90% idle.

Upgrade notes for 1.7.0

  • Zulip 1.7 contains some significant database migrations that can take several minutes to run. The upgrade process automatically minimizes disruption by running these first, before beginning the user-facing downtime. However, if you’d like to watch the downtime phase of the upgrade closely, we recommend running them first manually as well as the usual trick of doing an apt upgrade first.

  • We’ve removed support for an uncommon legacy deployment model where a Zulip server served multiple organizations on the same domain. Installs with multiple organizations now require each organization to have its own subdomain.

    This change should have no effect for the vast majority of Zulip servers that only have one organization. If you manage a server that hosts multiple organizations, you’ll want to read our guide on multiple organizations.

  • We simplified the configuration for our password strength checker to be much more intuitive. If you were using the PASSWORD_MIN_ZXCVBN_QUALITY setting, it has been replaced by the more intuitive PASSWORD_MIN_GUESSES.

Full feature changelog

  • Simplified the process for installing a new Zulip server, as well as fixing the most common road bumps and confusing error messages.

  • Added a new “incoming webhook” bot type, limited to only sending messages into Zulip, for better security.

  • Added experimental support for outgoing webhooks.

  • Added support for changing the notifications stream.

  • Added ‘u’ hotkey to show a user’s profile.

  • Added ‘-’ hotkey to toggle collapsing a message.

  • Added an organization setting to require topics in stream messages.

  • Added an organization setting to control whether edit history is available.

  • Added a confirmation dialogue when inviting many users to a new stream.

  • Added new notification setting to always get push notifications on a stream.

  • Added new “getting started” guides to the user documentation.

  • Added support for installing a Zulip server from a Git checkout.

  • Added support for mentioning a user when editing a message.

  • Added Opsgenie, Google Code-In, Google Search, and xkcd integrations.

  • Added support for organization administrators deleting private streams.

  • Added support for using any LDAP attribute for login username.

  • Added support for searching by group-pm-with.

  • Added support for mentioning users when editing messages.

  • Added a much prettier prompt for enabling desktop notifications.

  • Added a new PHYSICAL_ADDRESS setting to be used in outgoing emails to support compliance with anti-spam regulations.

  • Dramatically improved the search typeahead experience when using multiple operators.

  • Improved design for /stats page and added a link to it in the gear menu.

  • Improved how timestamps are displayed across the product.

  • Improved the appearance of mention/compose typeahead.

  • Improved lightbox to support panning and zooming on images.

  • Improved “more topics” to fetch all historical topics from the server.

  • Improved scrollbars across the site to look good on Windows and Linux.

  • Improved visual design of stream management UI.

  • Improved management of disk space, especially when deploying with Git frequently.

  • Improve mention typeahead sort order to prioritize recent senders in a stream.

  • Swapped the ‘q’ and ‘w’ hotkeys to better match the UI.

  • Fixed most issues with the registration flow, including adding OAuth support for mobile and many corner case problems.

  • Significantly improved sort ordering for the emoji picker.

  • Fixed most accessibility errors detected by major accessibility checker tools.

  • Extracted Zulip’s Python API and bots ecosystem into its own repository, zulip/python-zulip-api.

  • Enter hotkey now opens compose in empty narrows.

  • Significantly improved performance of “starred messages” and “mentions” database queries through new indexes.

  • Upgraded to Django 1.11.x.

  • Upgraded to a more modern version of the SourceSansPro font.

  • Redesigned several settings subpages to be visually cleaner.

  • Redesigned Zulip’s error pages to feature cute illustrations.

  • Dramatically improved the user typeahead algorithm to suggest relevant users even in large organizations with 1000s of accounts.

  • Fixed log rotation structural issues which wasted a lot of disk.

  • Updated notification settings to not require a “save changes” button.

  • Rewrote the documentation for almost all of our integrations to be much clearer and more consistent through use of Markdown and macros.

  • Restructured Zulip’s management commands to use a common system for accessing realms and users.

  • Made starting editing a message you just sent not require a round trip.

  • Dramatically increased test coverage of the frontend codebase.

  • Dramatically improved the responsive mobile user experience.

  • Changed the right sidebar search to ignore diacritics.

  • Overhauled error handling in the new user registration flows.

  • Fixed minor bugs in several webhook integrations.

  • Fixed several local echo bugs involving mentions and line-wrapping.

  • Fixed various inconsistent old-style buttons in settings pages.

  • Fixed some obscure bugs with uploading files.

  • Fixed issues with deactivating realm emoji.

  • Fixed rendering of emoji in tweet previews.

  • Fixed buggy translation caching which filled local storage.

  • Fixed handling of desktop and mobile apps in new-login emails.

  • Fixed caching of source repository in upgrade-zulip-from-git.

  • Fixed numerous minor internationalization bugs.

  • Fixed several bugs with the LDAP authentication backend.

  • Fixed several corner case bugs with push notification.

  • Fixed rendering of realm emoji in missed-message emails.

  • Fixed various endpoints incorrectly using the PUT HTTP method.

  • Fixed bugs in scrolling up using the home key repeatedly.

  • Fixed a bug where private messages from multiple users could be included in a single missed-message email.

  • Fixed issues with inconsistent visual display of @-all mentions.

  • Fixed zombie process leaks on servers with <4GB of RAM.

  • Fixed Markdown previews of /me messages.

  • Fixed a subtle bug involving timestamps of locally echoed messages.

  • Fixed the behavior of key combinations like Ctrl+Enter in the compose box.

  • Worked around Google Compute Engine’s default boto configuration, which broke Zulip (and any other app using boto).

  • Zulip now will gracefully handle the PostgreSQL server being restarted.

  • Optimized marking an entire topic as read.

  • Switched from npm to yarn for downloading JS packages.

  • Switched the function of the ‘q’ and ‘w’ search hotkeys.

  • Simplified the settings for configuring senders for our emails.

  • Emoji can now be typed with spaces, e.g. entering “robot face” in the typeahead as well as “robot_face”.

  • Improved title and alt text for Unicode emoji.

  • Added development tools to make iterating on emails and error pages easy.

  • Added backend support for multi-use invite links (no UI for creating yet).

  • Added a central debugging log for attempts to send outgoing emails.

  • Added a deprecation notice for the legacy QT-based desktop app.

  • Removed most remaining legacy API format endpoints.

  • Removed the obsolete shortname-based syntax.

  • Removed the old django-guardian dependency.

  • Removed several obsolete settings.

  • Partially completed migration to webpack as our static asset bundler.

Zulip 1.6.x and older

1.6.0 – 2017-06-06

Highlights

  • A complete visual redesign of the logged-out pages, including login, registration, integrations, etc.

  • New visual designs for numerous UI elements, including the emoji picker, user profile popovers, sidebars, compose, and many more.

  • A complete redesign of the Zulip settings interfaces to look a lot nicer and be easier to navigate.

  • Organization admins can now configure the login and registration pages to show visitors a nice organization profile with custom text and images, written in Markdown.

  • Massively improved performance for presence and settings pages, especially for very large organizations (1000+ users).

  • A dozen useful new keyboard shortcuts, from editing messages to emoji reactions to drafts and managing streams.

  • Typing notifications for private message threads.

  • Users can now change their own email address.

  • New saved-drafts feature.

  • The server can now run on a machine with as little as 2GB of RAM.

  • The new Electron desktop app and new React Native mobile app for iOS are now the recommended Zulip apps.

  • Mobile web now works much better, especially on iOS.

  • Support for sending mobile push notifications via a new forwarding service

  • Complete translations for Spanish, German, and Czech (and expanded partial translations for Japanese, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Serbian, Malayalam, Korean, and Italian).

Full feature changelog

  • Added Basecamp, Gogs, Greenhouse, Home Assistant, Slack, Splunk, and WordPress webhook integrations.

  • Added LaTeX support to the Markdown processor.

  • Added support for filtering branches to all Git integrations.

  • Added read-only access to organization-level settings for all users.

  • Added UI for managing muted topics and uploaded files.

  • Added UI for displaying message edit history.

  • Added support for various features needed by new mobile app.

  • Added deep links for settings/subscriptions interfaces.

  • Added an animation when messages are edited.

  • Added support for registration with GitHub auth (not just login).

  • Added tracking of uploaded file quotas.

  • Added option to display emoji as their alt codes.

  • Added new audit log table, to eventually support an auditing UI.

  • Added several new permissions-related organization settings.

  • Added new endpoint for fetching presence data, useful in employee directories.

  • Added typeahead for language for syntax highlighting in code blocks.

  • Added support for basic Markdown in stream descriptions.

  • Added email notifications on new Zulip logins.

  • Added security hardening before serving uploaded files.

  • Added new PRIVACY_POLICY setting to provide a Markdown privacy policy.

  • Added an icon to distinguish bot users as message senders.

  • Added a command-line Slack importer tool using the API.

  • Added new announcement notifications on stream creation.

  • Added support for some newer Unicode emoji code points.

  • Added support for users deleting realm emoji they themselves uploaded.

  • Added support for organization administrators deleting messages.

  • Extended data available to mobile apps to cover the entire API.

  • Redesigned bots UI. Now can change owners and reactivate bots.

  • Redesigned the visuals of code blocks to be prettier.

  • Changed right sidebar presence UI to only show recently active users in large organizations. This has a huge performance benefit.

  • Changed color for private messages to look better.

  • Converted realm emoji to be uploaded, not links, for better robustness.

  • Switched the default password hasher for new passwords to Argon2.

  • Increased the paragraph spacing, making multi-paragraph.

  • Improved formatting of all Git integrations.

  • Improved the UI of the /stats analytics pages.

  • Improved search typeahead to support group private messages.

  • Improved logic for when the compose box should open/close.

  • Improved lightbox to support scrolling through images.

  • Improved Markdown support for bulleted lists.

  • Improved copy-to-clipboard support in various places.

  • Improved subject lines of missed message emails.

  • Improved handling of users trying to log in with OAuth without an account.

  • Improved UI of off-the-Internet errors to not be hidden in narrow windows.

  • Improved rate-limiting errors to be more easily machine-readable.

  • Parallelized the backend test suite; now runs 1600 tests in <30s.

  • Fixed numerous bugs and performance issues with stream management.

  • Fixed an issue with the fake emails assigned to bot users.

  • Fixed a major performance issue in stream creation.

  • Fixed numerous minor accessibility issues.

  • Fixed a subtle interaction between click-to-reply and copy-paste.

  • Fixed various formatting issues with /me messages.

  • Fixed numerous real-time sync issues involving users changing their name, avatar, or email address and streams being renamed.

  • Fixed numerous performance issues across the project.

  • Fixed various left sidebar ordering and live-updated bugs.

  • Fixed numerous bugs with the message editing widget.

  • Fixed missing logging / rate limiting on browser endpoints.

  • Fixed regressions in Zulip’s browser state preservation on reload logic.

  • Fixed support for Unicode characters in the email mirror system.

  • Fixed load spikes when email mirror is receiving a lot of traffic.

  • Fixed the ugly grey flicker when scrolling fast on Macs.

  • Fixed previews of GitHub image URLs.

  • Fixed narrowing via clicking on desktop notifications.

  • Fixed Subscribed/Unsubscribed bookends appearing incorrectly.

  • Eliminated the idea of a realm having a canonical domain; now there’s simply the list of allowed domains for new users.

  • Migrated avatars to a user-id-based storage setup (not email-based).

  • Trailing whitespace is now stripped in code blocks, avoiding unnecessary scrollbars.

  • Most API payloads now refer to users primarily by user ID, with email available for backwards-compatibility. In the future, we may remove email support.

  • Cleaned up Zulip’s supervisord configuration. A side effect is the names of the log files have changed for all the queue workers.

  • Refactored various endpoints to use a single code path for security hardening.

  • Removed support for the MANDRILL_CLIENT setting. It hadn’t been used in years.

  • Changed NOREPLY_EMAIL_ADDRESS setting to Name <user@example.com> format.

  • Disabled the web tutorial on mobile.

  • Backend test coverage is now 93%, with 100% in views code.

1.5.2 – 2017-06-01

  • CVE-2017-0896: Restricting inviting new users to admins was broken.

  • CVE-2015-8861: Insecure old version of handlebars templating engine.

1.5.1 – 2017-02-07

  • Fix exception trying to copy node_modules during upgrade process.

  • Improved styling of /stats page to remove useless login/register links.

1.5.0 – 2017-02-06

Highlights

  • Completely redesigned the Manage streams interface.

  • Added support for emoji reactions to messages.

  • Added a lightbox for viewing images and videos.

  • Added an extensive user documentation site at /help/.

  • Added admin setting to auto-linkify certain strings (useful for issue numbers and Git commit IDs).

  • Upgraded how the main application runs from FastCGI on Django 1.8 to uwsgi and Django 1.10.

  • Added preliminary support for open graph previews of links (the setting, INLINE_URL_EMBED_PREVIEW, is disabled by default in this release).

Full feature changelog

  • Added an emoji picker/browser to the compose box.

  • Added Markdown preview support to the compose box.

  • Added a new analytics system to track interesting usage statistics.

  • Added a /stats page with graphs of the analytics data.

  • Added display of subscriber counts in Manage streams.

  • Added support for filtering streams in Manage streams.

  • Added support for setting a stream description on creation.

  • Added support for copying subscribers from existing streams on creation.

  • Added several new search/filtering UI elements.

  • Added UI for deactivating your own Zulip account.

  • Added support for viewing the raw Markdown content of a message.

  • Added support for deploying Zulip with subdomains for each realm. This entailed numerous changes to ensure a consistent experience.

  • Added support for (optionally) using PGRoonga to support full-text search in all languages (not just English).

  • Added AppFollow, GitLab, Google Calendar, GoSquared, HelloSign, Heroku, Librato, Mailchimp, Mention, Papertrail, Sentry, Solano Labs, Stripe and Zapier integrations.

  • Added a webhook integration for GitHub, replacing the deprecated github-services hook.

  • Normalized the message formatting for all the Zulip Git integrations.

  • Added support for VMware Fusion Vagrant provider for faster OSX development.

  • Added a shields.io style badge for joining a Zulip server.

  • Added admin setting for which email domains can join a realm.

  • Added admin setting for controlling who can create streams.

  • Added admin setting to limit stream creation to older users.

  • Added a notification when you muted a topic.

  • Added a new hotkey for muting/unmuting topics.

  • Added support for testing websockets to the Nagios plugins.

  • Added a configuration option to disable websockets.

  • Added support for removing one’s own Zulip account.

  • Added support for realm admins which auth backends are supported.

  • Added new organization type concept. This will be used to control whether Zulip is optimized around protecting user privacy vs. administrative control.

  • Added #streamName syntax for linking to a stream.

  • Added support for viewing Markdown source of messages.

  • Added setting to always send push notifications.

  • Added setting to hide private message content in desktop notifications.

  • Added buttons to download .zuliprc files.

  • Added italics and strikethrough support in Markdown implementation.

  • Added errors for common installations mistakes (e.g. too little RAM).

  • Added a new /authors page showing the contributors to the current Zulip version.

  • Added illustrations to the 404 and 500 pages.

  • Upgraded all Python dependencies to modern versions, including Django 1.10 (all of Zulip’s patches have been merged into mainline).

  • Increased backend test coverage of Python codebase to 90%.

  • Increased mypy static type coverage of Python code to 100%.

  • Added several new linters (eslint, pep8) and cleaned the codebase.

  • Optimized the speed of the Zulip upgrade process, especially with Git.

  • Have peer_add events send user_id, not email.

  • Fixed problems with RabbitMQ when installing Zulip.

  • Fixed JavaScript not being gzip-compressed properly.

  • Fixed a major performance bug in the Tornado service.

  • Fixed a frontend performance bug creating streams in very large realms.

  • Fixed numerous bugs where strings were not properly tagged for translation.

  • Fixed several real-time sync bugs, and removed several AJAX calls. Zulip should be more performant than ever before.

  • Fixed Zulip Tornado service not working with http_proxy set in environment.

  • Fixed text overflow in stream subscriptions.

  • Fixed CSS issues with message topic editing.

  • Fixed several transactionality bugs (e.g. in Huddle creation).

  • Fixed missed-message email configuration error handling.

  • Fixed annoying @-mentions in Jira integration.

  • Fixed various mismatches between frontend and backend Markdown implementations.

  • Fixed various popover-related UI bugs.

  • Fixed duplicate notifications with multiple open Zulip tabs.

  • Fixed support for emailing the server administrator about backend exceptions.

  • Cleaned up the “edit message” form.

  • Eliminated most of the legacy API endpoints.

  • Improved typeahead and autocomplete across the application. Highlights include much better handling of many users with similar names.

  • Improved the color scheme for code blocks.

  • Improved the message editing UI in several ways.

  • Improved how dates are displayed in the UI.

  • Improved default settings for zxcvbn password strength checker.

  • Upgraded jQuery to the latest 1.12 release.

  • Made numerous improvements to the development tooling.

  • Made extensive improvements to code organization.

  • Restyled all the registration pages to look nicer and be responsive.

  • Extensively refactored views to use common functions for fetching stream and message objects.

  • Suppressed @-all mentions being treated as mentions on muted streams.

  • Documented preliminary design for interactive bot system.

1.4.3 - 2017-01-29

  • CVE-2017-0881: Users could subscribe to invite-only streams.

1.4.2 - 2016-09-27

  • Upgraded Django to version 1.8.15 (with the Zulip patches applied), fixing a CSRF vulnerability in Django (see https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2016/sep/26/security-releases/), and a number of other Django bugs from past Django stable releases that largely affects parts of Django that are not used by Zulip.

  • Fixed buggy logrotate configuration.

1.4.1 - 2016-09-03

  • Fixed settings bug upgrading from pre-1.4.0 releases to 1.4.0.

  • Fixed local file uploads integration being broken for new 1.4.0 installations.

1.4.0 - 2016-08-25

  • Migrated Zulip’s python dependencies to be installed via a virtualenv, instead of the via apt. This is a major change to how Zulip is installed that we expect will simplify upgrades in the future.

  • Fixed unnecessary loading of zxcvbn password strength checker. This saves a huge fraction of the uncached network transfer for loading Zulip.

  • Added support for using Ubuntu 16.04 in production.

  • Added a powerful and complete realm import/export tool.

  • Added nice UI for selecting a default language to display settings.

  • Added UI for searching streams in left sidebar with hotkeys.

  • Added Semaphore, Bitbucket, and HelloWorld (example) integrations.

  • Added new webhook-based integration for Trello.

  • Added management command for creating realms through web UI.

  • Added management command to send password reset emails.

  • Added endpoint for mobile apps to query available auth backends.

  • Added Let’s Encrypt documentation for getting SSL certificates.

  • Added nice rendering of Unicode emoji.

  • Added support for pinning streams to the top of the left sidebar.

  • Added search box for filtering user list when creating a new stream.

  • Added realm setting to disable message editing.

  • Added realm setting to time-limit message editing. Default is 10m.

  • Added realm setting for default language.

  • Added year to timestamps in message interstitials for old messages.

  • Added GitHub authentication (and integrated python-social-auth, so it’s easy to add additional social authentication methods).

  • Added TERMS_OF_SERVICE setting using Markdown formatting to configure the terms of service for a Zulip server.

  • Added numerous hooks to Puppet modules to enable more configurations.

  • Moved several useful Puppet components into the main Puppet manifests (setting a Redis password, etc.).

  • Added automatic configuration of PostgreSQL/memcached settings based on the server’s available RAM.

  • Added scripts/upgrade-zulip-from-git for upgrading Zulip from a Git repo.

  • Added preliminary support for Python 3. All of Zulip’s test suites now pass using Python 3.4.

  • Added support for Name <email@example.com> format when inviting users.

  • Added numerous special-purpose settings options.

  • Added a hex input field in color picker.

  • Documented new Electron beta app and mobile apps in the /apps/ page.

  • Enabled Android Google authentication support.

  • Enhanced logic for tracking origin of user uploads.

  • Improved error messages for various empty narrows.

  • Improved missed message emails to better support directly replying.

  • Increased backend test coverage of Python code to 85.5%.

  • Increased mypy static type coverage of Python code to 95%. Also fixed many string annotations to properly handle Unicode.

  • Fixed major i18n-related frontend performance regression on /#subscriptions page. Saves several seconds of load time with 1k streams.

  • Fixed Jinja2 migration bug when trying to register an email that already has an account.

  • Fixed narrowing to a stream from other pages.

  • Fixed various frontend strings that weren’t marked for translation.

  • Fixed several bugs around editing status (/me) messages.

  • Fixed queue workers not restarting after changes in development.

  • Fixed Casper tests hanging while development server is running.

  • Fixed browser autocomplete issue when adding new stream members.

  • Fixed broken create_stream and rename_stream management commands.

  • Fixed zulip-puppet-apply exit code when puppet throws errors.

  • Fixed EPMD restart being attempted on every puppet apply.

  • Fixed message cache filling; should improve perf after server restart.

  • Fixed caching race condition when changing user objects.

  • Fixed buggy Puppet configuration for supervisord restarts.

  • Fixed some error handling race conditions when editing messages.

  • Fixed fastcgi_params to protect against the httpoxy attack.

  • Fixed bug preventing users with mit.edu emails from registering accounts.

  • Fixed incorrect settings docs for the email mirror.

  • Fixed APNS push notification support (had been broken by Apple changing the APNS API).

  • Fixed some logic bugs in how attachments are tracked.

  • Fixed unnecessarily resource-intensive RabbitMQ cron checks.

  • Fixed old deployment directories leaking indefinitely.

  • Fixed need to manually add localhost in ALLOWED_HOSTS.

  • Fixed display positioning for the color picker on subscriptions page.

  • Fixed escaping of Zulip extensions to Markdown.

  • Fixed requiring a reload to see newly uploaded avatars.

  • Fixed @all warning firing even for @all.

  • Restyled password reset form to look nice.

  • Improved formatting in reset password links.

  • Improved alert words UI to match style of other settings.

  • Improved error experience when sending to nonexistent users.

  • Portions of integrations documentation are now automatically generated.

  • Restructured the URLs files to be more readable.

  • Upgraded almost all Python dependencies to current versions.

  • Substantially expanded and reorganized developer documentation.

  • Reorganized production documentation and moved to ReadTheDocs.

  • Reorganized .gitignore type files to be written under var/

  • Refactored substantial portions of templates to support subdomains.

  • Renamed local_settings.py symlink to prod_settings.py for clarity.

  • Renamed email-mirror management command to email_mirror.

  • Changed HTTP verb for create_user_backend to PUT.

  • Eliminated all remaining settings hardcoded for zulip.com.

  • Eliminated essentially all remaining hardcoding of mit.edu.

  • Optimized the performance of all the test suites.

  • Optimized Django memcached configuration.

  • Removed old prototype data export tool.

  • Disabled insecure RC4 cipher in nginx configuration.

  • Enabled shared SSL session cache in nginx configuration.

  • Updated header for Zulip static assets to reflect Zulip being open source.

1.3.13 - 2016-06-21

  • Added nearly complete internationalization of the Zulip UI.

  • Added warning when using @all/@everyone.

  • Added button offering to subscribe at bottom of narrows to streams the user is not subscribed to.

  • Added integrations with Airbrake, CircleCI, Crashlytics, IFTTT, Transifex, and Updown.io.

  • Added menu option to mark all messages in a stream or topic as read.

  • Added new Attachment model to keep track of uploaded files.

  • Added caching of virtualenvs in development.

  • Added mypy static type annotations to about 85% of the Zulip Python codebase.

  • Added automated test of backend templates to test for regressions.

  • Added lots of detailed documentation on the Zulip development environment.

  • Added setting allowing only administrators to create new streams.

  • Added button to exit the Zulip tutorial early.

  • Added web UI for configuring default streams.

  • Added new OPEN_REALM_CREATION setting (default off), providing a UI for creating additional realms on a Zulip server.

  • Fixed email_gateway_password secret not working properly.

  • Fixed missing helper scripts for RabbitMQ Nagios plugins.

  • Fixed skipping forward to latest messages (“More messages below” button).

  • Fixed netcat issue causing Zulip installation to hang on Scaleway machines.

  • Fixed rendering of /me status messages after message editing.

  • Fixed case sensitivity of right sidebar fading when compose is open.

  • Fixed error messages when composing to invalid PM recipients.

  • Fixed LDAP auth backend not working with Zulip mobile apps.

  • Fixed erroneous WWW-Authenticate headers with expired sessions.

  • Changed “coworkers” to “users” in the Zulip UI.

  • Changed add_default_stream REST API to correctly use PUT rather than PATCH.

  • Updated the Zulip emoji set (the Android emoji) to a modern version.

  • Made numerous small improvements to the Zulip development experience.

  • Migrated backend templates to the faster Jinja2 templating system.

  • Migrated development environment setup scripts to tools/setup/.

  • Expanded test coverage for several areas of the product.

  • Simplified the API for writing new webhook integrations.

  • Removed most of the remaining JavaScript global variables.

1.3.12 - 2016-05-10

  • CVE-2016-4426: Bot API keys were accessible to other users in the same realm.

  • CVE-2016-4427: Deactivated users could access messages if SSO was enabled.

  • Fixed a RabbitMQ configuration bug that resulted in reordered messages.

  • Added expansive test suite for authentication backends and decorators.

  • Added an option to logout_all_users to delete only sessions for deactivated users.

1.3.11 - 2016-05-02

  • Moved email digest support into the default Zulip production configuration.

  • Added options for configuring PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, and memcached in settings.py.

  • Added documentation on using Hubot to integrate with useful services not yet integrated with Zulip directly (e.g. Google Hangouts).

  • Added new management command to test sending email from Zulip.

  • Added Codeship, Pingdom, Taiga, TeamCity, and Yo integrations.

  • Added Nagios plugins to the main distribution.

  • Added ability for realm administrators to manage custom emoji.

  • Added guide to writing new integrations.

  • Enabled camo image proxy to fix mixed-content warnings for http images.

  • Refactored the Zulip Puppet modules to be more modular.

  • Refactored the Tornado event system, fixing old memory leaks.

  • Removed many old-style /json API endpoints

  • Implemented running queue processors multithreaded in development, decreasing RAM requirements for a Zulip development environment from ~1GB to ~300MB.

  • Fixed rerendering the complete buddy list whenever a user came back from idle, which was a significant performance issue in larger realms.

  • Fixed the disabling of desktop notifications from 1.3.7 for new users.

  • Fixed the (admin) create_user API enforcing restricted_to_domain, even if that setting was disabled for the realm.

  • Fixed bugs changing certain settings in administration pages.

  • Fixed collapsing messages in narrowed views.

  • Fixed 500 errors when uploading a non-image file as an avatar.

  • Fixed Jira integration incorrectly not @-mentioning assignee.

1.3.10 - 2016-01-21

  • Added new integration for Travis CI.

  • Added settings option to control maximum file upload size.

  • Added support for running Zulip development environment in Docker.

  • Added easy configuration support for a remote PostgreSQL database.

  • Added extensive documentation on scalability, backups, and security.

  • Recent private message threads are now displayed expanded similar to the pre-existing recent topics feature.

  • Made it possible to set LDAP and EMAIL_HOST passwords in /etc/zulip/secrets.conf.

  • Improved the styling for the Administration page and added tabs.

  • Substantially improved loading performance on slow networks by enabling gzip compression on more assets.

  • Changed the page title in narrowed views to include the current narrow.

  • Fixed several backend performance issues affecting very large realms.

  • Fixed bugs where draft compose content might be lost when reloading site.

  • Fixed support for disabling the “zulip” notifications stream.

  • Fixed missing step in postfix_localmail installation instructions.

  • Fixed several bugs/inconveniences in the production upgrade process.

  • Fixed realm restrictions for servers with a unique, open realm.

  • Substantially cleaned up console logging from run-dev.py.

1.3.9 - 2015-11-16

  • Fixed buggy #! lines in upgrade scripts.

1.3.8 - 2015-11-15

  • Added options to the Python API for working with untrusted server certificates.

  • Added a lot of documentation on the development environment and testing.

  • Added partial support for translating the Zulip UI.

  • Migrated installing Node dependencies to use npm.

  • Fixed LDAP integration breaking autocomplete of @-mentions.

  • Fixed admin panel reactivation/deactivation of bots.

  • Fixed inaccurate documentation for downloading the desktop apps.

  • Fixed various minor bugs in production installation process.

  • Fixed security issue where recent history on private streams might be visible to new users (to the Zulip team) who were invited with that private stream as one of their initial streams (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/230).

  • Major preliminary progress towards supporting Python 3.

1.3.7 - 2015-10-19

  • Turn off desktop and audible notifications for streams by default.

  • Added support for the LDAP authentication integration creating new users.

  • Added new endpoint to support Google auth on mobile.

  • Fixed desktop notifications in modern Firefox.

  • Fixed several installation issues for both production and development environments.

  • Improved documentation for outgoing SMTP and the email mirror integration.

Upgrade notes

This section links to the upgrade notes from past releases, so you can easily read them all when upgrading across multiple releases.