Bitnami Discourse Stack is a multiplatform and free software project that aims to deliver an all-in-one, easy-to-install and easy-to-use native installers for the Discourse discussion application, as well as all of its required dependencies. The Discourse stack is also distributed as cloud images, a virtual appliance, and a Docker container.
What is Discourse?
Discourse is an open source and freely distributed discussion platform that features built-in governance and moderation systems, which let discussion communities protect themselves from spambots, bad actors and trolls. It offers a wide variety of attractive functionality.
Installing Bitnami Discourse Stack
Bitnami Discourse Stack is available for download on the GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit (recommended) computers. To install Discourse on your desktop computer or laptop, you must download the package that corresponds to your computer’s hardware architecture, run it and follow the instructions displayed on the screen. Please note that the Discourse stack is not available for the Microsoft Windows platform.
Run Discourse in the cloud
Thanks to Bitnami, users are now able to run their own Discourse stack server in the cloud with their hosting platform or by using a pre-built cloud image for the Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure cloud hosting providers.
Bitnami’s Discourse virtual appliance
Bitnami also offers a virtual appliance for virtualizing the Discourse application on the Oracle VirtualBox and VMware ESX, ESXi virtualization software, based on the latest stable version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
The Discourse Docker container and LAMP and MAMP modules
Besides installing Discourse on your personal computer, run it in the cloud or virtualize it, you can use the Docker container, which is available for download on the project’s homepage (see link below for details). Unfortunately, you won’t be able to deploy Discourse on top of a Bitnami LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) Stack or Bitnami MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP) Stack products, without having to deal with its runtime dependencies.