Do you remember the problems you ran into? I'm evaluating zulip with the help of the docker container (1.9.0-rc2) at the moment and docker-compose was enough to get it running.
Unfortunately not. It was a while ago, so I might have been unlucky with the version I tried. I believe after half a day of struggling to get it working, I got to the point where I was required to setup an organization or something like that and quit at that point and spent some time trying to remove everything.