How Do I Install Discourse?

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.

Still interested?

Click here for the OFFICIAL INSTALL GUIDE

Alternately, you can try the unofficial Heroku install guide, or the BitNami Discourse Virtual Machine package.

Quick and Dirty Install

Hardware

Dual core CPU recommended
2 GB RAM recommended (and 2 GB of swap space)

Software

Postgres 9.1+

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

Redis 2.6+
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.

Low memory (less than 2 GB)

Remember you will need swap enabled (enough for a total of 4 GB, so 2 GB swap with 2 GB RAM, and 3 GB swap with 1 GB ram, etc) and working! To reduce memory footprint, 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.

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