Discourse - The online home for your community

Discourse make your community easy to connect and collaborate anytime, anywhere. Discourse now powers over 20,000 online communities of all shapes and sizes, including GitLab, SailPoint, OpenAI, Elastic, Docker, Unreal Engine, and many more.

For more details about Discourse, see their homepage.

Features

• Features for every use case: Discourse enables thoughtful discussion and meaningful connections with features for every use case, from tracking product feedback to sharing your latest creations, now with the added support of AI.
• Endless ways to customize: Keep your forum on brand, integrate with your tech stack, and optimize forum features for engagement.
• Quick chats and thoughtful discussions: An integrated experience for chat and long form discussions enables members to build relationships while your community builds knowledge.
• Powerful moderation tools: Keep the discussion healthy, on-track, and free from any inappropriate content with our best-in-class moderation tools and AI.
• Fully open source: The entire Discourse codebase is open and freely available to the public—forever.
• Truly portable data: No matter where your forum lives, you retain full ownership of your data. No lock-in, no hidden fees, no data sent to advertisers.
• Unlimited conversation history: Always have full access to your community’s conversation history—no questions asked.

Usage

This Discourse is based on the Bitnami Discourse image. You can find more information about the image here.

The initialization may take about 5 minutes. Before the initialization is complete, you may see a 502 error.

You can see the username and password of your Discourse instance in the "Overview" > "Instructions" section.

Plugin Installation

Run the following command to install the plugin:

cd /opt/bitnami/discourse && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake plugin:install repo=<plugin Git repository URL>

Replace <plugin Git repository URL> with the URL of the plugin's Git repository. For example, to install the discourse-custom-header-links plugin, run the following command:

cd /opt/bitnami/discourse && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake plugin:install repo=https://github.com/discourse/discourse-custom-header-links

After the installation of your plugin, restart your Discourse to precompile the assets.

SMTP configuration

You will see some variables starting with DISCOURSE_SMTP in the "Environment Variables" section. You can set these variables to configure the SMTP settings for your Discourse instance.

After the configuration, restart your Discourse and Sidekiq to apply the changes.