Hi ! I’m developping a Discourse plugin for internal purposes, and also try to contribute to the core. The stable version of the plugin uses a stable version of discourse, so I have to constantly switch the code base: use the main branch when contributing to the core use the version used in our production env when patching bugs for the plugin use the latest version when adding features to the plugin Every time, I have to destroy the dev container (d/shutdown_dev), delete data and tmp, checkout the right Discourse version, then rebuild and relaunch the container (d/boot_dev --init), configure the first user, then apply our configuration (via a kind of automated restore script), potentially many times a day. Is there a way to make this less painful ? Ideally, i’d like to : be able to configure the dev container not to start automatically be able to have many dev containers that I can start/stop whenever I want. d/boot_dev --help displays the --env/--env-files arguments but I could not find anything about what I can configure with it Do you have the same kind of issues ? How do you manage to solve it ?

One way to do this is to have multiple containers, one for stable, one for main. Another option is Using dv (Discourse Vibe) to configure Discourse AI in development You don’t have to use any of the AI features of dv, if you don’t want to (though they can be handy, of course). But at core, dv lets you spin up multiple containers very quickly. So you could run two containers side-by-side (or more), one for each version/branch.

Is there an easy way to change version during development?

Development

manut (Manuel Tancoigne) January 22, 2026, 11:04pm 3

Thanks, I’ll look into it.

Topic		Replies	Views
Developing Discourse using a Dev Container Developer Guides	13	20111	May 28, 2026
Discourse development through docker or other Product Support	8	393	May 30, 2025
One attempt at keeping a Dev environment up to date Development	4	227	January 17, 2025
Docker deploy specific version of Discourse Self-hosting docker	1	562	February 5, 2024
Install v1.7.2 using Docker Development	6	1149	March 21, 2017

Is there an easy way to change version during development?

Related topics