# Avatars in an offline install
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/avatars-in-an-offline-install/47735
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Created:** [July 24, 2016, 11:13pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/avatars-in-an-offline-install/47735 "2016-07-24T23:13:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@alexrcs](https://meta.discourse.org/u/alexrcs)
#### Post date: [July 24, 2016, 11:13pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/avatars-in-an-offline-install/47735/1 "2016-07-24T23:13:47Z")
I’m trying to deploy a Discourse instance on a fully offline environment. We have a community of about 8000 people (mainly developers) on a big “local area” network.
Getting internet access to the server is not an option (it’s Cuba: mostly 56kbps dial-up modem at homes).
I’ve been juggling a little with the docker images/containers (luckily I’m not new to Rails), and I managed to get it up and running, by doing the bootstrap process on an online PC (and some more mumbo-jumbo that ain’t important right now).
The thing is, I found the nginx to be configured to use avatars dot discourse dot org as the backend for letter avatars. On an offline environment, this address is of course unreachable.
Is there any way I can still use these letter avatars locally? Maybe I missed some configuration or something. Any help would be appreciated.
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### Author:  [@mpalmer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mpalmer)
#### Post date: [July 24, 2016, 11:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/avatars-in-an-offline-install/47735/2 "2016-07-24T23:17:10Z")
Sure, just point your `external avatars url` site setting at `/letter_avatar`, and that’ll generate letter avatars on your local server.
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### Author:  [@alexrcs](https://meta.discourse.org/u/alexrcs)
#### Post date: [July 24, 2016, 11:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/avatars-in-an-offline-install/47735/3 "2016-07-24T23:18:22Z")
Good to know! Thanks @mpalmer!