Hello, I am working on setting up Discourse locally and am very confused. I have read that the “The only officially supported installs of Discourse are Docker based.” (discourse/docs/INSTALL.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub) So I would like to set up with docker. However the guides only talk about setting up discourse directly on a DigitalOcean server. Thats great but doesn’t help me as I want to develop in discourse locally before ever deploying to a server. I am also confused because the main discourse GitHub only has links to a Vagrant install. So what is the official supported version, Vagrant or Docker? Can someone please point me in the direction to set up a discourse docker environment locally? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

The only supported install version for production is Docker. For development (as you’ve noticed) you have far more options. Vagrant is one, if you want to do development locally in docker, see https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/bin/docker.

Oh that makes sense. Thank you! I also dont have a ./discourse-setup script. So I am confused as to how to set up emails etc

I am having some issues using docker in development and ran into this article saying that Docker is not for devlopment. These are a couple years old, has this changed? https://meta.discourse.org/t/development-environment-vagrant-or-docker/12170/5

I do believe things have changed. But I’m not an engineer. @sam can confirm.

By any chance is there a guide to using docker and discourse in development? I am new to docker, so maybe I am missing something, but it looks like I need to have ‘./bin/docker/’ before all my commands. Why doesn’t docker-run work?

The guide is linked to in my second post: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/bin/docker. You need to complete the following: Install git. Clone Discourse locally. Install docker. Run the two commands in the guide.

Thanks for answering so fast Joshua. Let me clarify. I have followed the commands in that link and am running the discourse server locally through docker. Now I want to run commands such as ‘rake db:migrate’ but how do I run those commands within the docker container? I am also confused as I dont see a Dockerfile or docker compose. My understanding is that when using docker I should be able to run ‘docker-run rake db:migrate’ to migrate the db within the docker container.

Take a look at all the scripts inside bin/docker. They are very helpful and one of them is migrate. So, calling ./bin/docker/migrate will migrate your development and test database. Of course you can also use ./bin/docker rake if you want to execute other rake tasks. You can also follow the instructions of the Install Discourse on Ubuntu or Debian for Development if you don’t want to use the Docker based environment.

If you take a look at the scripts in discourse/bin/docker at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub boot_dev creates and runs a container in detached mode, and rails/rake/etc utilizes docker exec to run the respective commands in the existing container, which are intended to make running those commands easier. As for the Dockerfile question, it is answered in the README linked before: discourse/bin/docker/README.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub There is a folder d at the project root symlinked to bin/docker, thus you can actually do d/boot_dev, d/rails s, etc.

Docker setup for development

Development

jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld) October 18, 2017, 5:26pm 4

The Discourse Setup script is intended for production. If you wish to use Docker for development, follow the guide I linked above.

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Docker setup for development

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