So you want to set up a development environment for Discourse on Windows 10? You can do it easily using Windows Subsystem for Linux feature. It is faster too .
This setup requires the WSL 2 installation. It is only available in Windows 10 builds 18917 or higher. Weāll assume that you already installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (Ubuntu) on your Windows 10 system. Letās begin!
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Initially follow the steps from the topic Beginners Guide to Install Discourse on Ubuntu for Development until the step Clone Discourse.
Before setting up the database you have to start PostgreSQL service & Redis server manually using following commands
sudo service postgresql start redis-server --daemonize yes
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Then go through all the remaining steps of the Ubuntu guide.
Now your development environment is almost ready. The only problem is every time when you open Ubuntu on Windows you have to start the PostgreSQL service & Redis server manually. Donāt worry we can have a workaround for this by creating a custom command
cd ~
Create a new file using the command nano start-discourse
and paste the content below then save and exit.
#!/bin/bash
# to start PostgreSQL
sudo service postgresql start
# to start Redis server
redis-server --daemonize yes
Now modify the CHMOD using below command
chmod +x start-discourse
And copy the file to your bin folder
sudo cp start-discourse /usr/bin/
Itās done. Now, whenever you open the Ubuntu bash just run the command below and start developing
start-discourse
Alternatively, if you are using Windows 10 enterprise, pro, or education edition then you can create a Linux virtual machine in hyper-v to set up the Discourse dev environment.