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 instruction - it requires an SMTP server and a domain. I also saw another guide which goes through the installation of the stack on …

[image] Install Discourse for development using Docker Developer Guides Developing using Docker Since Discourse runs in Docker, you should be able to run Discourse directly from your source directory using a Discourse development container. white_check_mark Pr…

Do you want a development install or a production install? If it’s the latter, then see Discourse official Standard Installation . Running under k8s is possible, but it’s not straightforward, as you need to use ./launcher to build the container. And doing a full no-downtime upgrade requires a few step…

@merefield Thanks for the Docker link. That works, and that’s close to what I imagined the process would look like. Although, it’s a bit weird that everything is packaged into one container. And yeah, it is slow. What surprised me is that when I git clone discourse, and cd discourse, my shell becom…

It’s for production and it requires https so you need a domain name. The azure one will work. You don’t have to use the same domain name for the mail server as the hostname. A while back I changed discourse-setup to prompt for the notification email address. Subdomain means just don’t use x.com bu…

Hi Marcin, I have the same concern with you about the domain names for discourse. WHY LOCALHOST IS NOT ENOUGH? I just only install discourse for my team to play but cannot without DNS. We tried to add DNS resource with localhost to the hosts file on my server to resolve but unsuccessful. Does any…

[image] Im_Nim: Does anyone No. If you want to run a development install you don’t need a hostname, but it works only for localhost. If you want your team to use it, you need a host name. If you have a team, surely you have a domain name? Just create some subdomain of whatever your company us…

Well for us – we don’t want discourse to be public. We want an internal discussion board. I’m with the others, localhost fails, install fails when you are just trying to give it a test run. Really off putting and the crazy scripts instead of the well known and standard ‘docker-compose up -d --build’…

Or maybe it was written before docker-compose was a viable utility and it still works on thousands of sites and a change would risk breaking them all for an edge case. If the server has access to the outside world its not that hard to disable the https stuff, though I’ve not done it in a while.

@pfaffman That is exactly what happened when docker-compose was released in 2015. It was met with healthy skepticism. My organization has no public servers. Can I get discourse, which frankly is the best solution going without a .com?

You need a domain name, but it does not need to be on a public ip. If your server can access the internet (to download discourse and it’s pieces) then you can turn off the let’s encrypt stuff and it should work. I think you just need to delete the ssl and let’s encrypt templates in the yml file, but…

How to install Discourse locally?

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merefield (Robert) April 1, 2021, 2:48pm 2

and without docker (in case of interest/you find above too slow):

Topic		Replies	Views
Do I need to install Docker? Development	1	580	November 1, 2019
Discourse standalone Development	5	1446	June 27, 2022
Images are not being populated in discourse Self-hosting	1	755	August 4, 2021
How do I create Discourse forum with docker and VPS? Self-hosting	8	371	June 12, 2025
How install discourse in home path? Self-hosting	4	3000	December 12, 2015

How to install Discourse locally?

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