README

The online home for your community.



 You can self-host Discourse on your own infrastructure. But if you'd rather skip the setup, maintenance, and server management, we offer official Discourse hosting.

 👉 Learn more about Discourse hosting

Discourse is a 100% open-source community platform for those who want complete control over how and where their site is run.

Our platform has been battle-tested for over a decade and continues to evolve to meet users’ needs for a powerful community platform.

With Discourse, you can:

 💬 Create discussion topics to foster meaningful conversations.

 ⚡️ Connect in real-time with built-in chat.

 🎨 Customize your experience with an ever-growing selection of official and community themes.

 🤖 Enhance your community with plugins, from chatbots powered by Discourse AI to advanced tools like SQL analysis with the Data Explorer plugin.

To learn more, visit discourse.org and join our support community at meta.discourse.org.


Here are just a few of the incredible communities using Discourse:

!discourse-communities

👉 Discover more communities using Discourse


 Development

To get your environment set up, follow one of the setup guides:

- Docker
    - Dev Container in VS Code (recommended)
    - CLI
- macOS
- Ubuntu/Debian
- Windows

Before you get started, ensure you have the following minimum versions: Ruby 4.0, PostgreSQL 18+, Redis 7.

For more information, check out the Developer Documentation.

 Setting up Discourse

See discourse.org/pricing for official Discourse hosting plans, including the Free plan.

For self-hosted installations, run this single command:


wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/discourse/discourse_docker/main/install-discourse | sudo bash


Read the Discourse Install Guide for more details on how to set up Discourse in production for both beginner and advanced setups.

 Requirements

Discourse supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers and platforms:

| Browsers              | Tablets      | Phones       |
| --------------------- | ------------ | ------------ |
| Apple Safari          | iPadOS       | iOS          |
| Google Chrome         | Android      | Android      |
| Microsoft Edge        |              |              |
| Mozilla Firefox       |              |              |

Additionally, we aim to support Safari on iOS 16.4+.

 Built With

- Ruby on Rails — Our back end API is a Rails app. It responds to requests RESTfully in JSON.
- Ember.js — Our front end is an Ember.js app that communicates with the Rails API.
- PostgreSQL — Our main data store is in Postgres.
- Redis — We use Redis as a cache and for transient data.
- BrowserStack — We use BrowserStack to test on real devices and browsers.

Plus lots of Ruby Gems, a complete list of which is at /main/Gemfile.

 Contributing



Discourse is 100% free and open source. We encourage and support an active, healthy community that
accepts contributions from the public –