Discourse Advanced Developer Install Guide

This guide is aimed at advanced Rails developers who have installed their own Rails apps before. If you are new to rails, you are likely much better off with our Discourse Vagrant Developer Guide.

First Steps

Install and configure PostgreSQL 9.1+
Install and configure Redis 2+
Install Ruby 1.9.3 and Bundler.
Clone the project.
Create development and test databases in postgres.
Copy config/database.yml.sample and config/redis.yml.sample to config/database.yml and config/redis.yml and input the correct values to point to your postgres and redis instances.
We recommend starting with seed data to play around in your development environment. Download Seed SQL Data. Install it into postgres using a command like this: psql -d discourse_development < dev-discourse-seed.sql.

Before you start Rails

bundle install
rake db:migrate
rake db:test:prepare
Try running the specs: bundle exec rspec
bundle exec rails server

You should now be able to connect to rails on http://localhost:3000 - try it out! The seed data includes a pinned topic that explains how to get an admin account, so start there! Happy hacking!

Building your own Vagrant VM

Here are the steps we used to create the Vagrant Virtual Machine. They might be useful if you plan on setting up an environment from scratch on Linux:

Base box

Vagrant version 1.0.5. With this Vagrantfile:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.box     = 'precise32'
  config.vm.box_url = 'http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box'
  config.vm.network :hostonly, '192.168.10.200'

  if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /darwin/
    config.vm.share_folder("v-root", "/vagrant", ".", :nfs => true)
  end
end

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Some basic setup:

sudo su -
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Eastern /etc/localtime
apt-get -yqq update
apt-get -yqq install python-software-properties
apt-get -yqq install vim curl expect debconf-utils git-core build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev openssl libcurl4-openssl-dev libreadline6-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev

Unicode

echo "export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
echo "export LANG=en_US.UTF-8" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
echo "export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
dpkg-reconfigure locales

RVM and Ruby

apt-get -yqq install libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion pkg-config curl build-essential git

su - vagrant -c "sudo bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)"
adduser vagrant rvm
source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh
su - vagrant -c "rvm pkg install libyaml"
su - vagrant -c "rvm install 1.9.3-p374"
su - vagrant -c "rvm use 1.9.3-p374 --default"

echo "gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri" >> /etc/gemrc
su - vagrant -c "echo 'gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri' >> ~/.gemrc"

Postgres 9.1

Configure so that the vagrant user doesn't need to provide username and password.

apt-get -yqq install postgresql postgresql-contrib-9.1 libpq-dev postgresql-server-dev-9.1
su - postgres
psql -c "CREATE USER vagrant WITH PASSWORD 'password';"
psql -c "ALTER USER vagrant WITH PASSWORD 'password';"
createdb vagrant
psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION hstore;"
psql -c "ALTER USER vagrant CREATEDB"
psql -c "create database discourse_development owner vagrant encoding 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
psql -c "create database discourse_test        owner vagrant encoding 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"

Also, a user "discourse" is needed when importing a database image.

createuser --createdb --superuser discourse
psql -c "ALTER USER discourse WITH PASSWORD 'password';"

Edit /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf to have this:

local all all trust 
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust
host all all ::1/128 trust
host all all 0.0.0.0/0 trust # wide-open

Download a database image from http://discourse.org/vms/dev-discourse-seed.sql.

Load it (as vagrant user):

psql -d discourse_development < dev-discourse-seed.sql

Redis

mkdir /tmp/redis_install
cd /tmp/redis_install
wget http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.6.7.tar.gz
tar xvf redis-2.6.7.tar.gz
cd redis-2.6.7
make
make install
cd utils
./install_server.sh
# Press enter to accept all the defaults
/etc/init.d/redis_6379 start

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