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.

Still interested?

Official install guide

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

No time to read all that? Here's the quick and dirty version.

Hardware

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

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 a clockwork process for enqueing scheduled jobs
• Run several Rails processes, preferably behind a proxy like Nginx.

Low memory installs

Remember you will need swap enabled 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.