# How to install Discourse locally?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-install-discourse-locally/185116>\
**Category:** Self-hosting\
**Created:** [April 1, 2021, 2:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-install-discourse-locally/185116 "2021-04-01T14:43:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Marcin\_J](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/marcin_j/32/215377_2.png) [@Marcin\_J](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Marcin_J)\
**Post date:** [April 1, 2021, 2:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-install-discourse-locally/185116/1 "2021-04-01T14:43:29Z")

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I’m looking into Discourse as a candidate for a forum in my project.  
I am a bit surprised by how convoluted it is to actually run the stack.

On GitHub there is [this](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md) instruction - it requires an SMTP server and a domain.

I also saw another [guide](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/DEVELOPER-ADVANCED.md) which goes through the installation of the stack on the host directly. I’d prefer to rely on Docker to have all these dependencies set up 🙂  
What also confused me is that the first guide put great emphasis on the fact that I need SMTP server, and DNS. This one does not mention that at all.

It seemed to me that since it is all dockerized, I should be able to just run some Docker Compose to have Discourse and the database (as I see it’s Postgresql) containers running (+ possibly some other containers, like caching if Discourse needs it). Then, in production, I’d probably host in on Kubernetes (seems to not be so easy as I’ve read in some thread).

Am I missing something?

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