Self-Hosting Discourse Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

Falco
Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:28:56 +0000
Announcements

We’re excited to announce a major update to how you can self-host Discourse. Whether you’ve been curious about running your own Discourse instance or found the setup process daunting in the past, today’s changes are for you.

Install Discourse with a Single Command

Setting up Discourse on your own server is now as simple as running one command:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/discourse/discourse_docker/main/install-discourse | sudo bash

That’s it. Run this on a fresh server, and you’ll have a working Discourse installation. No more juggling configuration files or following lengthy setup guides.

SMTP is now optional

As @codinghorror once put it:

Wizard will not send validation email more than once

What can I say? Email is the hardest problem in computer science.

To alleviate this, we’ve made SMTP optional. The new installer allows you to skip SMTP setup entirely by relying on Discourse ID for login.

SMTP setup was always the number one issue people setting up Discourse for the first time struggled with, so we are excited to finally remove this hurdle in our install.

Free Subdomain with Discourse ID

With SMTP solved, we aimed for the next hurdle: getting a domain. You’d need to purchase a domain, configure DNS records, and wait… all before even seeing Discourse run.

We’ve solved this. When you run the installer and don’t have a domain ready, we’ll guide you to claim a free discourse.diy subdomain through your Discourse ID account. This means you can have your community up and running in minutes, not hours.

Already have your own domain? Great, the installer supports that too! But if you just want to try things out or get started quickly, we’ve got you covered.

A Friendlier Setup Experience

The new installer also features a new interactive wizard, with fewer steps and built with newer tech that will allow us to keep iterating on it.

What You Need

To self-host Discourse, you’ll need:

A cloud server (from providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, or similar)

About 10 minutes of your time

That’s the new bar for entry. We’ve worked hard to remove the friction so you can focus on building your community.

Get Started

Ready to try it out? Head over to our updated installation guide for step-by-step instructions.

To see what the entire process looks like, you can check out the screenshots available here.

If you run into any issues or have feedback, let us know in this topic. We’d love to hear about your experience with the new installer.

This update is part of our ongoing effort to make Discourse more accessible to everyone, whether you’re running a community on our hosted platform or on your own infrastructure.

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