Introduction

Discourse is an open-source discussion platform. You can use Discourse as a mailing list, a discussion forum, or a long-form chat room. In this tutorial, you will install Discourse in an isolated environment using Docker, a containerization application.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, there are a few things you will need:

• One Ubuntu 20.04 server with at least 2GB of RAM, a sudo non-root user, and a firewall. For guidance, you can reference our initial server setup tutorial for Ubuntu 20.04.
• Docker installed on your server. To accomplish this, you can follow step 1 of our Docker installation tutorial for Ubuntu 20.04.
• A domain (or subdomain) with an available A record pointed at your server’s IP. If you are managing your DNS on DigitalOcean, then you can follow this guide to associate your IP with your domain. This tutorial will use discourse.your_domain.
• An SMTP mail server. If you don’t want to run your own mail server, you can use another service, like a free account on Mailgun.

Step 1 — Downloading Discourse

Before downloading and installing Discourse, create the /var/discourse directory. This is where all your Discourse-related files will reside:

sudo mkdir /var/discourse

Finally, clone the official Discourse Docker Image into /var/discourse:

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

With the Discourse Docker image in place, you can now install and configure your platform.

#ubuntu 20.04 #discourse #docker #docker