Discourse is a powerful open source community platform designed to be easy to use and customize. Installing it on Windows 11 can be done with the following steps:
Before installing Discourse, you will need the following:
Windows Subsystem for Linux enabled with a Linux distribution installed. See Microsoft's documentation for details on how to enable it.
Docker Desktop installed on Windows 11. You can download it from the Docker website.
Step 1: Create a new directory for Discourse installation using either the command line or file explorer. For example, you can create a directory named "discourse" in the WSL file system by running the following command:
mkdir ~/discourse
Step 2: Clone the Discourse repository into the newly created directory. Run the following command to clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git ~/discourse
Step 3: Navigate to the Discourse directory using the command-line interface by running the following command:
cd ~/discourse
Step 4: Copy the samples/standalone.yml file to the discourse.yml file by running the following command:
cp samples/standalone.yml containers/app.yml
Step 5: Open the discourse.yml file in a text editor and make the following changes in the env section:
UNICORN_WORKERS: 2
DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: 'your_email_address@example.com'
DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME: 'discourse.example.com'
Make sure to replace your_email_address@example.com and discourse.example.com with your own values.
Step 6: Run the following command to start the Discourse installation:
sudo ./launcher bootstrap app
This command downloads the necessary Docker images and sets up the Discourse containers.
Step 7: Run the following command to start the Discourse server:
sudo ./launcher start app
The installation is complete, and the Discourse server should now be accessible at http://localhost:1080.
In this tutorial, we went through the necessary steps to install Discourse on Windows 11. By following the steps, you can easily set up a Discourse community site on your Windows 11 machine.
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