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 …

[image] AliBenBongo: Install Ubuntu on WSL2 using this command:- wsl.exe --install -d Ubuntu This part might fail. If it does click start , type turn windows features on or off Enable virtual machine platform Reboot Resume the commands. [image]

[image] AliBenBongo: cd ~/discourse 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…

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.

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 resol…

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?

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 …

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.

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 b…

[image] AliBenBongo: Initial Preparation Check for any WSL updates and install them if applicable. From a Windows Powershell window use this command:- It should be noted that, if you don’t have any subsystems installed yet then this command will not work.

Guide to Setting Up Discourse Development Environment - Windows 11

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merefield (Robert) March 8, 2026, 12:51pm 20

The former is considered older than the requirement so you will need to use rbenv or equivalent to install a more recent version.

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Guide to Setting Up Discourse Development Environment - Windows 11

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