Beginners Guide to Install Discourse on Mac OS X for Development

So you want to set up Discourse on Mac OS X to hack on and develop with?

We’ll assume that you don’t have Ruby/Rails/Postgre/Redis installed on your Mac. Let’s begin!

(If you want to install Discourse for production use, see our install guide)

Install Discourse Dependencies

Run this script in terminal, to setup Rails development environment:

bash 

This script will install following new packages on your system:

• Git
• rbenv
• ruby-build
• Ruby (latest stable)
• Rails
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Bundler
• ImageMagick
• PhantomJS

In case you have any of this package pre-installed and don’t want to run entire script, see the script and pick the packages you don’t have currently installed. The script is fine-tuned for Discourse, and includes all the packages required for Discourse installation.

Now that we have installed Discourse dependencies, let’s move on to install Discourse itself.

Clone Discourse

Clone the Discourse repository in ~/discourse folder:

git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse.git ~/discourse

~ indicates home folder, so Discourse source code will be available in your home folder.

Setup Database

Open psql prompt:

psql postgres

Create discourse_development and discourse_test database with your account short name specified as role:

CREATE DATABASE discourse_development WITH OWNER techapj ENCODING 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;
CREATE DATABASE discourse_test WITH OWNER techapj ENCODING 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;

Note that in above commands I specified the role as techapj, this means that my short name is techapj, replace this with your own short name.

Exit psql prompt by pressing controld

Now access psql prompt in discourse_development database as your short name user:

psql -d discourse_development -U techapj -h localhost

Run following commands, separately:

CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;
CREATE EXTENSION hstore;

Exit psql prompt by pressing controld

Now access psql prompt in discourse_test database as your short name user:

psql -d discourse_test -U techapj -h localhost

Run following commands, separately:

CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;
CREATE EXTENSION hstore;

Exit psql prompt by pressing controld

You have set-up the database successfully!

Bootstrap Discourse

Switch to your Discourse folder:

cd ~/discourse

Install the needed gems

bundle install

Now that you have successfully installed gems, run this command:

bundle exec rake db:migrate db:test:prepare db:seed_fu

Try running the specs:

bundle exec rake autospec

All the tests should pass.

Start rails server:

bundle exec rails server

You should now be able to connect with your Discourse app on http://localhost:3000 - try it out!

Create New Admin

To create a new admin, run the following commands in rails console:

RAILS_ENV=development bundle exec rake admin:create

Just enter your input as suggested, you can create an admin account.

Happy hacking! And to get started with that, see Beginner’s Guide to Creating Discourse Plugins.

Source: https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-install-discourse-on-mac-os-x-for-development/15772