discourse/docs/DEVELOPER-ADVANCED.md

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.

Note: If you are developing on a Mac, you will probably want to look at these instructions as well.

Preparing a fresh Ubuntu install

To get your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS install up and running to develop Discourse and Discourse plugins follow the commands below. We assume an English install of Ubuntu.

# Basics
whoami > /tmp/username
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/redis-server
sudo apt-get -yqq update
sudo apt-get -yqq install python-software-properties vim curl expect debconf-utils git-core build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev openssl libcurl4-openssl-dev libreadline6-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev imagemagick postgresql postgresql-contrib-9.5 libpq-dev postgresql-server-dev-9.5 redis-server advancecomp gifsicle jhead jpegoptim libjpeg-turbo-progs optipng pngcrush pngquant gnupg2

# Ruby
curl -sSL https://rvm.io/mpapis.asc | gpg2 --import -
curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
echo 'gem: --no-document' >> ~/.gemrc

# exit the terminal and open it again to activate RVM

rvm install 2.3.4
rvm --default use 2.3.4 # If this error out check https://rvm.io/integration/gnome-terminal
gem install bundler mailcatcher

# Postgresql
sudo su postgres
createuser --createdb --superuser -Upostgres $(cat /tmp/username)
psql -c "ALTER USER $(cat /tmp/username) WITH PASSWORD 'password';"
psql -c "create database discourse_development owner $(cat /tmp/username) encoding 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
psql -c "create database discourse_test        owner $(cat /tmp/username) encoding 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
psql -d discourse_development -c "CREATE EXTENSION hstore;"
psql -d discourse_development -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;"
exit

# Node
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.2/install.sh | bash

# exit the terminal and open it again to activate NVM

nvm install node
nvm alias default node
npm install -g svgo phantomjs-prebuilt

If everything goes alright, let's clone Discourse and start hacking:

git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git ~/discourse
cd ~/discourse
bundle install
bundle exec rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:migrate

# run the specs (optional)
bundle exec rake autospec # CTRL + C to stop

# launch discourse
bundle exec rails s -b 0.0.0.0 # open browser on http://localhost:3000 and you should see Discourse

Create a test account, and enable it with:

bundle exec rails c
u = User.find(1)
u.activate
u.grant_admin!
exit

Discourse does a lot of stuff async, so it's better to run sidekiq even on development mode:

ruby $(mailcatcher) # open http://localhost:1080 to see the emails, stop with pkill -f mailcatcher
bundle exec sidekiq # open http://localhost:3000/sidekiq to see queues
bundle exec rails server

And happy hacking!