Set up Discourse in the cloud in under 30 minutes with zero knowledge of Rails or Linux shell on a RW VPS Server...or ask our support for help at any time!

Start a New VPS Server

Create a new VPS and select Ubuntu LTS as your OS

The VP-RW0 comes with 1 GB RAM and works fine for small Discourse communities. We recommend the RW-1 KVM VPS with 2 GB RAM for larger communities.
San Fransisco is a good choice for most US and European audiences. Or select a region that is geographically closer to your audience.
Enter you domain as your hostname forum.mydomain.tld and proceed.

Within a few minutes your VPS will be up and running with OS and Network configured so you just have to start and install your Discourse as follows.

Install Discourse

Clone the Official Discourse Docker Image into /var/discourse.

sudo -s
git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse
cd /var/discourse

You will need to be root through the rest of the setup and bootstrap process.

Email

Email is CRITICAL for account creation and notifications in Discourse.
Already have a mail server? Great. Use your existing mail server credentials.
No existing mail server? Check out our Recommended Email Providers for Discourse.

To ensure mail deliver-ability, you must add valid SPF and DKIM records in your DNS. See your mail provider instructions for specifics.

Once you have everything ready you can proceed with the setup process.
It's important that at this point, your domain points to your server otherwise Discourse won't work properly neither your emails.

If you don't have a domain name, you can order one with RW Hosting!

Launch the setup tool

./discourse-setup
You will be required to answer the following questions
Hostname for your Discourse? [forum.mydomain.tld]:
Email address for admin account(s)? [me@mydomain.tld]:
SMTP server address? [smtp.example.com]:
SMTP port? [587]:
SMTP user name? [user@example.com]:
SMTP password? [pa$$word]:
Let's Encrypt account email? (ENTER to skip) [me@example.com]

This will generate an app.yml configuration file on your behalf, and then kicks off bootstrap.
Bootstrapping takes between 2-5 minutes to set up your Discourse.
If you need to change these settings after bootstrapping, you can run ./discourse-setup again (it will re-use your previous values from the file) or edit /containers/app.yml manually with nano and then ./launcher rebuild app, otherwise your changes will not take effect.