I’ve created a tutorial that walks you through the process of setting up a local discourse instance on vagrant for your local tests to embed discourse in your front-end development project. You can find it here: Local discourse: vagrant, ansible, lxd, docker, discourse-embedding
This is different from other descriptions that I found before in that it allows you to run locally a complete discourse set-up like you would do in production to get a feel for the “real” set-up process. In addition this set-up is able to serve as a local development playground for embedding discourse into your project.