ARM Support

[Timelord]

Afternoon. I don’t see any recent discussions on this, so, asking for a “2025” answer.

Is Discourse supported on an ARM based CPU?

[merefield (Robert)]

See raspberry-pi, and arm yes it is supported.

[Timelord]

Ahh! Thank you.

To confirm, not just PI, but any box running an ARM processor?

[merefield (Robert)]

Shall defer to a member of the team here:

ARM64 Production Level Reliability

While we use ARM for PostgreSQL and Redis production hosting, and we have made the Ruby app ARM64 compatible since Discourse on a Raspberry Pi | Blog, we don’t host production traffic from our hosting in ARM yet. That said, as long as you can safely store database backups off-site and monitor the website for error/response times reliably, it should be safe to give ARM in production traffic.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

I’ve had a few instances on ARM servers (at Hetzner) for years and everything works as expected.

But be aware of this:

Mail-receiver lacks an official ARM-compatible image

Continuing the discussion from Does the mail-receiver work with arm?: It has been mentioned a couple of times on meta, but I guess it’s better if it has its own #feature request topic. Discourse works great on ARM servers. I never came across any issue. Unfortunately, running it on this architecture prevents you from using the official mail-receiver image. From a technical perspective, I know absolutely nothing and I (confidently) rely on what Matt said in the linked topic:

[Ed_S]

There’s also a difference, I think, in how ARM is pulled from the repo. I don’t fully understand:

@Ed_S

… on Intel the script checks to see if a new image is available, but on ARM it will always pull. The reason given is that ARM always uses a fixed tag. For example, today, we see in the launcher script two possibilities:
image="discourse/base:2.0.20240825-0027"
or
image="discourse/base:aarch64"
and as you see, one of those is maintained carefully as new images are approved, and the other is left to the position of the tag.