Discourse

Discourse is a community platform for organizations that want complete control over how and where their site runs. It has been in production for over a decade, and self-hosting removes the dependence on a forum vendor deciding pricing, data location and feature direction.

The backend is a Ruby on Rails application answering RESTfully in JSON, and the frontend is an Ember.js app talking to that API. PostgreSQL holds the main data store while Redis serves as cache and transient storage.

The platform gives community managers several distinct surfaces to work with.

• Discussion topics: the core format, built for conversations that stay readable over time.
• Real-time chat: a built in channel alongside threaded discussion.
• Themes: an ever growing set of official and community themes for changing how a site looks.
• Plugins: extend the site with tools such as Discourse AI chatbots and SQL analysis through Data Explorer.

Running it in production needs Ruby 3.4 or later, PostgreSQL 15 and Redis 7, with an install guide in the repository and development setups documented for Docker, macOS, Ubuntu, Debian and Windows. The latest stable releases of Safari, Chrome, Edge and Firefox are supported, along with iOS and Android. Official hosting exists for teams that prefer to skip server maintenance entirely.