discourse/docs/INSTALL.md

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

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 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!