@merefield Thanks for the Docker link. That works, and that’s close to what I imagined the process would look like. Although, it’s a bit weird that everything is packaged into one container. And yeah, it is slow.
What surprised me is that when I git clone discourse, and cd discourse, my shell becomes really slow - first time I see that 
. This repo must contain lots of files, or something, although I’m not sure why that would impact my shell.
@pfaffman I’d also like to try the installation that is closer to production one, to have an idea what the process looks like. I’m fine with installation on a VM. However, what about the SMTP server and the domain? The guide is very strict about these and says that I MUST have those.
And that would also be fine, but it’s just that I don’t fully understand some things:
- why is the domain actually needed? Why localhost is not enough?
- does the mail server need to point at the same domain as the domain I use for Discourse?
- the guide also talks about subdomains - why subdomain? I.e., I’m setting up a VM on Azure, and the VM has some DNS assigned to it (like myvm.westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com) - isn’t that domain enough?