# 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:** 4

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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 2, 2021, 6:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-install-discourse-locally/185116/4 "2021-04-02T06:34:13Z")

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@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 becomes really slow - first time I see that 🙂 . This repo must contain lots of files, or something, although I’m not sure why that would impact my shell.

@pfaffman I’d also like to try the installation that is closer to production one, to have an idea what the process looks like. I’m fine with installation on a VM. However, what about the SMTP server and the domain? The guide is very strict about these and says that I MUST have those.  
And that would also be fine, but it’s just that I don’t fully understand some things:

- why is the domain actually needed? Why localhost is not enough?
- does the mail server need to point at the same domain as the domain I use for Discourse?
- the guide also talks about subdomains - why subdomain? I.e., I’m setting up a VM on Azure, and the VM has some DNS assigned to it (like [myvm.westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com](http://myvm.westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com)) - isn’t that domain enough?

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