How to Self-Host Zulip with Docker Compose

What Is Zulip? Zulip is a self-hosted team chat platform built around topic-based threading. Every message belongs to a stream (like a channel) and a topic within that stream, so conversations stay organized even when dozens happen in parallel. This is fundamentally different from Slack and Teams where channels are a single chronological feed that becomes unreadable at scale. Zulip replaces Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord for teams that value async communication. It is fully open source (Apache 2.0), used by hundreds of open-source projects including the Lean theorem prover community and FOSS contributors who need structured discussion across time zones. GitHub Prerequisites A Linux server (Ubuntu 22.04+ recommended) Docker and Docker Compose installed ( guide ) 2 GB of free RAM minimum, plus 2 GB of swap configured (4 GB RAM recommended for 50+ users) 10 GB of free disk space A domain name pointed at your server (required for SSL and email) Standard Docker only — Zulip does not su