Kirill Bulatov
18be72fd68
Fixes https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/35780 Collab schema migration PR: https://github.com/zed-industries/cloud/pull/3422 The corresponding database schema migration has been created in the Cloud repo and applied to the production database. Before, Zed scanned each and every entry in the tree down from the directory it was opened in, except gitignored files and scan exclusions. The approach is unchanged, if Zed detects it was open inside a git repository: e.g. the directory open in Zed contains `.git` directory. For the rest of the projects, 2 optimizations are made: * Limit the depth of file scan traversal. Now, `file_scan_depth` (default `5`) restricts Zed from traversing any directory that has same number or more segments in its file path. Such directories behave similar to gitignored directories: their contents is not available in file finder, project search and project panel, but can be lazily traversed when the directory is expanded (e.g. project panel expands it or a nested file is open by path via terminal, etc.) To indicate that to the users, a status entry is shown firs time the limitation is hit in the project: <img width="858" height="133" alt="image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7da6cfbb-98b4-4cc3-bf2a-8902a9597a15" /> * During the scan, any git repositories that are not direct children of the directory open in Zed (depth >= 2), are traversed and indexed normally, but their git metadata is never fetched eagerly. Only when Zed opens a buffer from that repo the git metadata is fetched and applied. All that combined now uses a way more moderate amount of CPU and RAM when opening `~`: <img width="1717" height="368" alt="Screenshot 2026-08-13 at 17 43 53" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ec83e2a9-f7cc-452b-8eb7-af158284ca4e" /> File scan inclusions and exclusions are considered still for such projects. Set `file_scan_depth` to `0` to enable old behavior. The setting is supported in the project settings, so custom values can be set based on the project's structure. --- Release Notes: - Fixed Zed using a lot of memory and CPU in large, non-git-tracked, directory trees
Zed Server
This crate is what we run at https://collab.zed.dev.
It contains our back-end logic for collaboration, to which we connect from the Zed client via a websocket after authenticating via https://zed.dev, which is a separate repo running on Vercel.
Local Development
Database setup
Before you can run the collab server locally, you'll need to set up a zed Postgres database. Follow the steps sequentially:
- Ensure you have postgres installed. If not, install with
brew install postgresql@15. - Follow the steps on Brew's formula and verify your
$PATHcontains/opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@15/bin. - If you hadn't done it before, create the
postgresuser withcreateuser -s postgres. - You are now ready to run the
bootstrapscript:
script/bootstrap
This script will set up the zed Postgres database, and populate it with some users. It requires internet access, because it fetches some users from the GitHub API.
The script will create several admin users, who you'll sign in as by default when developing locally. The GitHub logins for the default users are specified in the seed.default.json file.
To use a different set of admin users, create crates/collab/seed.json.
{
"admins": ["yourgithubhere"],
"channels": ["zed"]
}
Testing collaborative features locally
In one terminal, run Zed's collaboration server and the livekit dev server:
foreman start
In a second terminal, run two or more instances of Zed.
script/zed-local -2
This script starts one to four instances of Zed, depending on the -2, -3 or -4 flags. Each instance will be connected to the local collab server, signed in as a different user from seed.json or seed.default.json.
Deployment
We run two instances of collab:
- Staging (https://staging-collab.zed.dev)
- Production (https://collab.zed.dev)
Both of these run on the Kubernetes cluster hosted in Digital Ocean.
Deployment is triggered by pushing to the collab-staging (or collab-production) tag in GitHub. The best way to do this is:
./script/deploy-collab staging./script/deploy-collab production
You can tell what is currently deployed with ./script/what-is-deployed.