Files
zed/crates/collab
Danilo LealandNathan Sobo 4a41cc4bf0 agent_ui: Improve the new thread worktree UX (#53941)
Closes https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/53262

- Remove the ability to pick a branch from the agent panel; delegate
this to the title bar picker
- Make the worktree creation earger, just as you selected whether you
want to create it from main or current branch
- Remove flicker when creating a new worktree and switching to a
previously existing one
- Improve some UI stuff: how we display that a worktree is
creating/loading, the branch and worktree icons, etc.
- Fixed a bug where worktrees in a detached HEAD state wouldn't show up
in the worktree pickers

A big part of the diff of this PR is the removal of everything involved
with the `StartThreadIn` enum/the set up involved in only creating the
worktree by the time of the first prompt send.

Release Notes:

- Agent: Improved and simplified the UX of creating threads in Git
worktrees.
- Git: Fixed a bug where worktrees in a detached HEAD state wouldn't
show up in the worktree picker.

---------

Co-authored-by: Nathan Sobo <nathan@zed.dev>
2026-04-15 03:47:19 +00:00
..

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:

  1. Ensure you have postgres installed. If not, install with brew install postgresql@15.
  2. Follow the steps on Brew's formula and verify your $PATH contains /opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@15/bin.
  3. If you hadn't done it before, create the postgres user with createuser -s postgres.
  4. You are now ready to run the bootstrap script:
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:

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.