Guide to Setting Up Discourse Development Environment - Windows 11

Installation
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Hi Everyone,

After spending some time attempting to get a working development environment up and running under Windows 11 / WSL2 I thought I would share the steps that I have followed.

This is my first post here so I hope that this is of use to somebody :slight_smile: I am a Systems Administrator used to working with Windows so this has been an interesting journey learning Linux / Ruby / Discourse etc.

A few things seem to have changed since the guide for Windows 10 was written and I ran into a few issues along the way (and from reading the comments, I wasn’t the only one!)

I can confirm that the following instructions worked on my Windows 11 Pro 22H2 install & also on my Windows Insider build of the upcoming Windows 11 23H2 Release Preview.

I’ll try to keep the instructions as short and straightforward as possible :slight_smile:

Initial Preparation

  1. Check for any WSL updates and install them if applicable. From a Windows Powershell window use this command:-

wsl.exe --update

  1. Install Ubuntu on WSL2 using this command:-

wsl.exe --install -d Ubuntu

  1. Follow the onscreen prompts to create the username and password

  2. Once you’re in the Ubuntu terminal, check for and install all applicable updates

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

  1. Now that everything is updated we can proceed :slight_smile:

WSL Modifications

  1. Before cloning Discourse, run the following command to open the /etc/wsl.conf file:-

sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf

  1. At the bottom of the existing file, add the following , press Ctrl + X to save the changes and press “Y” when prompted.
[automount]
enabled  = true
root     = /mnt/
options  = "metadata,umask=22,fmask=11"

  1. Completely close the WSL terminal and relaunch it for these changes to properly apply.

  2. Now copy and paste the following one-line installation script to set up the development environment. Depending on the speed of your computer and/or internet connection this might take a bit of time to complete, so go and grab a coffee or something!

bash <(wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/discourse/install-rails/master/linux)
  1. Start the PostgreSQL service:-
sudo service postgresql start
  1. Because we’re running in WSL2 I got a warning message about the VM running out of memory, which can be solved by running the following
sudo sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=1
  1. Run the following so that the redis-server automatically restarts:-
redis-server --daemonize yes
  1. Clone Discourse into the home folder:-
git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git ~/discourse
  1. Change to the newly-created Discourse folder:-
cd ~/discourse
  1. Run the following commands (I did them one line at a time)(Unsure whether this is necessary or if they can be copied and pasted in one go)
source ~/.bashrc

bundle install

yarn install
  1. Setup the environment:-
RAILS_ENV=development bundle exec rake db:create db:migrate
  1. Start Discourse
DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME=localhost UNICORN_LISTENER=localhost:3000 bin/ember-cli -u

  1. Open a separate terminal , change into the Discourse directory using cd ~/discourse and run rails admin:create - follow the instructions to set up your Admin user account.

  2. Go to http://localhost:4200 in a web browser and Discourse should all be up and running :slight_smile:

9 Likes
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This part might fail. If it does click start , type turn windows features on or off
Enable virtual machine platform
Reboot

Resume the commands.

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4 Likes
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Thanks for adding this Andrew!

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One very important thing that I struggled with for a while to figure out is that the repo absolutely must be on the WSL filesystem (i.e., NOT on /mnt/*). Otherwise, you’ll either get all kinds of odd errors or have a very, very, very slow instance.

This is supposed to be common knowledge, but from my interaction with other devs, it kind of isn’t.

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Hi AliBenBongo :wave:

Thank you for this guide.

Out of curiosity, did you try Install Discourse on Windows 10 for development but faced issues on Windows 11?

I followed this official guide less than two months ago to set up my dev install on Win11, and it worked flawlessly.

2 Likes
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That’s interesting yes I did try that guide first and ran into many error messages. I can’t remember specifically but some of the error messages were mentioned in the comments section of that same thread …

Think this is a good thing in the end as I’ve definitely got more knowledge now through resolving the issue myself and then writing this guide up! :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Probs a dum question but I have to ask. Assuming I could get this up and running following your guide. Do you think it’s possible to reverse proxy this to a domain?

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There are no dumb questions, we can all always learn something new! :slight_smile: I don’t have much experience with reverse proxy stuff except for using Nginx Proxy Manager in a Docker container - perhaps have a look at that as it does most of the hard work and even generates free SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt

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You are going to hit a lot of pain points I suspect. The dev install is not supported to run in Production.

Running the standard install in the cloud might cost a few dollars a month but how much is your time worth?! With that you can be up and running in 30 minutes and be done.

2 Likes
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That is in fact what I have done. I started off with on communiteq, I also tried DigitalOcean but have ultimately landed on Contabo.

I think I might be a lunatic because what I was trying doing (just to see if I could), running Ubuntu in HyperV, I even managed to get the VM on the same subnet lol but I could not get initial domain check to work. I think part of the problem is that I am already hosting a handfull of services on my Windows host and consequently I am port forwarding 80/443 to that machine IP. I know it’s beyond the scope of this thread and it’s not supported, but have you any experience trying to do something similar?

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It should be noted that, if you don’t have any subsystems installed yet then this command will not work.

1 Like
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I got stuck on installing Ruby; this helped me: https://chatgpt.com/share/34bf1295-7f31-450d-90cc-d850c113bc2b

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Hi, welcome :wave:

If you follow the steps in this guide, you won’t need to install Ruby manually. The “install-rails” script will do that automatically.

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FYI, the latest version of Ubuntu, 24.04, doesn’t seem to work & I had a lot of problems with it

So when installing with WSL, be sure to use:

wsl.exe --install -d Ubuntu-22.04