discourse/docs/INSTALL.md

Discourse "Quick-and-Dirty" Install Guide

It is still early times for Discourse. From our FAQ:

Discourse is brand new. Discourse is early beta software, and likely to remain so for many months. Please experiment with it, play with it, give us feedback, submit pull requests – but any consideration of fully adopting Discourse is for people and organizations who are eager to live on the bleeding and broken edge.

Discourse has two fairly decent install documents now:

• Our official Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS install document
• Unofficial Heroku install document

Beyond that, if you are feeling extra extra adventurous you'll need some server hardware:

• Dual core CPU recommended
• 2 GB RAM recommended (1 GB can work, but you'll need swap..)

And you can try to set up following components manually on it:

1. Postgres 9.1+

• Enable support for HSTORE
• Create a discourse database and seed it with a basic image

2. Redis 2.6+

3. Ruby 1.9.3+ (we recommend 2.0.0-p195 or higher)

• Install all rubygems via bundler
• Edit database.yml and redis.yml and point them at your databases.
• Run rake db:seed_fu to add seed data
• Prepackage all assets using rake
• Run the Rails database migrations
• Run a sidekiq process for background jobs
• Run a clockwork process for enqueing scheduled jobs
• Run several Rails processes, preferably behind a proxy like Nginx.

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Low memory installs

• Clockwork can run inside your web server, if you launch the your web server with EMBED_CLOCKWORK=1, clockwork will run in a backgroud thread. As clockwork itself only performs scheduling, it will have very little impact on performance