Setup

Getting Going

Discourse uses Vagrant for setting up its development environment. If you're not familiar with this style of development, there can be a bit of a learning curve. Here are some notes for getting up-to-speed quickly in OS X.

Dependencies

• Install VirtualBox
• Install Vagrant

Note On Mavericks, make sure you have VirtualBox 4.3.2 installed, which requires Vagrant > 1.3.5.

Discourse

You'll need to clone Discourse from the github repo, then provision a new virtual server.

$ mkdir -p ~/projects
$ cd projects
$ git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git
$ cd discourse
$ vagrant up

Grab some coffee...this takes a while the first time.

If you run in to issues (which should be resolved in the VirtualBox 4.3.2 version), consult the fixes at Fixing Vagrant after an OSX Mavericks update.

Using Vagrant

When you run vagrant up, vagrant will create a new virtual server and set up the project for you. You will be prompted for your admin password (your user account password) to mount you local files via an NFS mount.

After the virtual server has booted, you can connect to the server with the vagrant ssh command to log on to the server with root permissions (from the ~/projects/discourse directory, if you're following the Discourse Developer Install Guide (Vagrant).

Keeping Up To Date

Be sure to occasionally pull from the discourse repository and run bundle install and bundle exec rake db:migrate to make sure you've got the latest changes.

$ bundle install
$ bundle exec rake db:migrate

Starting Rails

Once you're VM is updated, start a rails instance from the server (vagrant ssh):

$ bundle exec rails s

This takes a few seconds, but will start rails so you can access it via a web browser at (http://localhost:4000)[http://localhost:4000]. If you can get to that page, everything worked!

Note: You may notice that the console output in vagrant tells you that rails is running on port 3000; vagrant uses port forwarding so port 3000 on the VM is displayed as port 4000 on your machine (just in case you're running another rails application on the default port somewhere else).

Shutting Down the VM

When you're done working, you can shut down Discourse with the halt command (assuming you've exited the ssh session):

$ exit
$ vagrant halt

MySQL

To get everything working in the virtual environment, you'll also need to install the MySQL server and then you can add the data dump. Assuming you've logged on to the virtual server (vagrant ssh), you'll need to install with these commands:

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server

During the installation process, you'll be prompted to create a root password for your system. Choose whatever you want, just remember it. If you do forget, you can reset the root password.

Now you can create a database with the following:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p create <database_name>

You can then check to make sure your database was created properly:

$ mysql -u root -p
> show databases;
> \q

This information needs to go in to the config/import_bbpress.yml file.

Importing Data

First you need to get a dump of the data. On the "production" server, create a dump of the SQL:

$ mysqldump -h <database_host> -u <username> -p <database_name> | bzip2 -z9 > ~/database.sql.bz

You can scp it to your local machine, then restore the database locally.

$ bzcat database.sql.bz | mysql -u <username> -p <local_database>

Note: This is just one of the many (many) ways to do this; if you have a way you like better, use it.