How to install the Open Source Discourse forum on Ubuntu Linux 16.04

Guide

Discourse is an open-source forum that can work in many forms, such as mailing lists, chat rooms, or forums. It is a popular and modern forum tool. On the server side, it is built using Ruby on Rails and Postgres, and uses the Redis cache to reduce read time, and on the client side, it uses a Java Script-enabled browser. It is very easy to customize, well structured, and it provides a conversion plugin that allows you to convert your existing forums, bulletin boards, such as VBulletin, PhpBB, Drupal, SMF, and more. In this article, we will learn to install Discourse under Ubuntu os.

installing Discourse on Ubuntu 16.04 installing Docker and Git

Let's get started! A minimum of 1G of memory is required, and the official supported installation process requires Docker already installed. When it comes to Docker, it also needs to install Git. To meet the above two-point requirement, we only need to run the following command:

wget-qo-https://get.docker.com/| Sh

It won't be long before you install Docker and Git, and after the installation is finished, create a Discourse folder on your system's/var partition (You can also choose other partitions, of course).

Mkdir/var/discourse

cloning a github repository

Now let's clone Discourse's Github repository to this new folder.

git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git/var/discourse

Go to this cloned folder.

Cd/var/discourse

You will see the "discourse-setup" script file that runs this script file for discourse initialization.

./discourse-setup

Note: Make sure you have the mail server installed before you install discourse.

Installation Wizard

The installation Wizard will ask you the following six questions:

Hostname for your Discourse? Email address for Admin account? SMTP server address? SMTP user name? SMTP port [587]:smtp password? []:

When you submit the above information, it will let you submit confirmation, if everything is normal, click Enter after the installation started.

Now "sit back and relax" and take some time to finish the installation, pour a cup of coffee and see what the error message is.

It should look like this after the installation is successful.

go to Browser settings

Now open the browser, if you have done a domain name resolution, you can use your domain name to connect the Discourse page, otherwise you can only use the IP address. You will see the following information:

That's it, click on the "Sign up" option to create a new account and then make your Discourse settings.

Conclusion

It is easy to install and works perfectly. It has all the essential features of a modern forum. It is released under the GPL and is a fully open source product. Simple, easy-to-use, and feature-rich are its greatest features.

How to install the Open Source Discourse forum on Ubuntu Linux 16.04