Set up a multisite development environment

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It’s possible to run discourse in multisite mode in development. A multisite server uses a different DB and hostname for each site that it serves. This is useful if you are developing a feature or a plugin that should be multisite compatible.

All you need to do is add an appropriate config/multisite.yml file. i.e:

---
alternate:
  adapter: postgresql
  database: discourse_alternate
  host_names:
  - alternate.localhost

To run rake tasks against these extra sites, simply add the RAILS_DB environment variable with the name of the site that you are targeting:

RAILS_DB=alternate rake db:create
RAILS_DB=alternate rake db:migrate

Some rake tasks are special in that, when RAILS_DB isn’t specified in development, they run across all sites:

rake db:create
rake db:migrate

In general, however, running rake tasks without RAILS_DB set will target the default site.

To access the site, you’ll need to run ember-cli with the --forward-host option.

bin/ember-cli -u --forward-host

You may now be able to view the your new site at http://alternate.localhost:4200, but if you cannot, you may need to add alternate.localhost to your /etc/hosts file or equivalent.

This document is version controlled - suggest changes on github.

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