Discourse 1.0 now available in Bitnami!

As Discourse users ourselves, we're happy to announce that Discourse 1.0 is now available from Bitnami! With this release, Discourse has smoothed out all of the rough edges, and is now ready and safe for production use. We have been using itto run the Bitnami Community discussion site for close to a year now and have been incredibly happy with it, even pre-1.0 release, so we highly recommend that you check out v1.0.

If you are not familiar with Discourse, it is a next-generation community forum platform created by Jeff Atwood, of Stack Overflow and Coding Horror fame, and his team. You can learn more about the Discourse project by listening to (or reading the transcript of) our interview with Jeff Atwood.

Bitnami Discourse is the easiest way to run own Discourse instance. We've packaged up Discourse as a self-contained, pre-configured distribution that includes everything you need to run Discourse and makes it simple to deploy. To get started with Bitnami Discourse, download free, ready-to-run installers for Linux or Mac OS X or our virtual machine images (VMs). Or, if you want to have a hosted Discourse, you can deploy Bitnami Discourse into the cloud via the Amazon and Azure clouds.

Get started with new Discourse easily with Bitnami Discourse Stacks.

Have questions? Take a look at our quick start guide or use our community forum and our team and community will be there to help!

Talking Discourse: An Interview with Jeff Atwood

One of our company founders, Erica Brescia, recently spoke with Jeff Atwood to ask what to look forward to in the 1.0 release of Discourse. We use Discourse for the Bitnami community, and we distribute Discourse for one-click, easy installation with native installers, as virtual machines and into the cloud. 


The conversation covers a lot of ground including:

• Why Discourse is a big giant ball of javascript
• The MySQL and PHP ghetto
• The cure for PHP server herpes
• Upcoming features in Discourse 1.0
• Why working on small features can be better than the big ones
• And more

Listen to the interview now or read the full transcript below. Click to play, sit back, enjoy.

Full transcript

Erica Brescia: Hi, this is Erica Brescia.  I'm one of the founders of Bitnami and I'm fortunate to have Jeff Atwood here, one of the creators of Discourse to talk a little bit about the Discourse project and what they have coming in the future as they work up to the 1.0 release.  So Jeff, thanks so much for joining me.

Jeff Atwood: Oh, you're welcome.  It's great to be here.

EB: And to start out, you know, discourse is, while popular still, a fairly new project.  I'd love it if you could tell Bitnami users a little bit about the project and what made you decide to start Discourse.

JA: Sure, so the main thing that motivated Discourse was that I couldn't find any forums that I felt comfortable recommending to people that needed communities.  And community is so important on the web and it just made me a little bit sad really that all the options I could find were ones I would nota feel comfortable installing myself.  They just weren't modern for lack of a better word.  There was a lot of really legacy stuff, legacy technology and there was no like leader.  There was nothing like if you were gonna set up a blog and you talk to somebody about it, somebody will say to you WordPress at some point because it's kind of the obvious choice.  It's open source, it's got a great ecosystem.  

You know it's essentially free and there are so many ways to host it and there are so many plug-ins.  And I want there to be something like that for forums because this idea that you have people talking to each other about a topic is really essential I think to a lot of businesses and a lot of communities too.  So discourse is supposed to be, intended to be the WordPress of forums essentially.  That's what we're shooting for.

An Introduction to Discourse

If you're looking at building a new community or refreshing an old one, Discourse should be on your short list of systems to consider. Discussion forums have been a part of the web for a long, long time. If we compare a 1990s web site with today, it’s clear that the art of web design has moved on a long way since then, yet web forums… haven’t really kept up. Discourse bills itself as a reboot of forum software for the next decade. Let's see why. 

The Discourse Design Philosophy

The Discourse project is spearheaded by Jeff Atwood, who was also a co-founder of Stack Exchange. With north of a hundred Stack Exchange Q&A boards around the web, it's clear that the new, modern design has resonated with web communities. Like Stack Exchange, Discourse set out to revitalize and modernize question and answer sites, and has been very successful, even inspiring quite a lot of competitors, such as OSQA. Discourse embodies a similar approach to forums.

Because Discourse was started from scratch recently, it has been relatively easy for the Discourse team to build modern web approaches directly into the core of the software. A small sampling of modern design touches include:

• Much greater emphasis on the conversation rather than the scaffolding of the web pages compared with older forums software
• New posts to a topic appear as you scroll down, rather than having a collection of minuscule “1, 2, 3, Next” links along the bottom
• Adding images to a forum post, for example, is done by modern dragging-and-dropping those images
• Responsive design for mobile users is built in
• If someone else posts to the thread you’re looking at then their addition shows up as you browse, without needing constant page refreshes to keep up
• Pasting a link to Wikipedia or YouTube or Amazon into a topic automatically “expands” that link to show the video or a summary of the article in question, saving readers from having to click through (and click away from your forum)

Unlike older systems, with Discourse, these features are native to the platform. Discourse itself is open source, and there’s a growing hacker community centered around the project and github; importantly, they’re not just interested in code contributions, but in our experience willing to help out with problems and listen to suggestions.

Installing Discourse

Discourse is implemented as a server which provides a JSON API, along with a JavaScript application which runs in the web browser and talks to that API. Discourse is built on Rails, Postgres, and Redis, and setting it up is done best on a public cloud (EC2, Rackspace, Azure) or Rails cloud hosting (Heroku, etc). The Discourse source contains step-by-step instructions for deploying to Heroku onto an Ubuntu server and others, but is made considerably easier by using something designed for the job. Obviously (at least we hope it is!), we provide one-click installs of Discourse to a local machine, as a virtual machine or into the cloud.

Discourse contains its own API, which at least in theory means that one never hits the situation where the forum provides a feature but the API doesn’t support it. However, because Discourse is still new and under heavy development, the API is a moving target. Support can be found on Discourse’s own support forum, meta.discourse.org.

What does this mean for the community manager or admin?

The Discourse team themselves are pretty clear that Discourse is best suited “for new discussion communities,” and not as a drop-in replacement for an existing forum full of posts and users and avatars. If you’re in the position of setting up such a thing, and you have easy installation or skilled devops available to you, Discourse is a good and modern tool to help you build a community. That community will thank you for it.

You’ll be ready for the next decade of discussion rather than trying to escape from the one before last, which means that you can get beyond fiddling with your forum software and instead focus on what you should be doing: enabling discourse.

Next steps

Check out the Discourse website or try Discourse free with Bitnami.

New Discourse version with speed improvements

We are happy to announce that a we have released a new Discourse version. You can download the free native installer for Linux or OS X or virtual machine or deploy Discourse to the Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure cloud.

In case you are not familiar with the Discourse project, it is an open source next-generation discussion platform with one goal in mind: to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflicts many other forums and comment threads.

If you want to check this new version, you can launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below.

Thanks to the suggestions of the Discourse community, we have been working on new improvements for the BitNami Discourse installations.

We are now enabling logrotate by default. If your community grows, server log files will also grow and you will need a way to periodically store and compress them to save space. We configured logrotate for all servers that Discourse requires: Apache, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq and Clockwork. The default logrotate configuration files are installed in the "config/logrotate" folder and logs are rotated weekly by default.

BitNami Discourse is even faster with the new bundled PageSpeed module. This module automatically applies web performance best practices to pages, and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without requiring that you modify your application. It is a great way to improve the performance without spending a lot of time investigating or optimizing the code.

Using PageSpeed, the first request to a sample Discourse welcome page has been reduced from 1,265KB to 344KB and the load time has been also reduced significantly from the previous version, around 30% in our tests.

More docs. We have documented how to configure Discourse with the Mandrill email service. Depending on the size of your community, Discourse may need send a lot of emails. We typically suggest using a GMail account during testing because it is more convenient, but if you are running a production server, it is better to use a third party service like Mandrill.

The Discourse team is working hard and continues to improve the application daily. We have prepared some documentation in our Wiki on how to maintain your installation up-to-date.

Discourse forum

We will continue releasing new versions of other BitNami stacks with similar improvements. stay tuned!

Security fix for Ruby 1.9 applications

A new Ruby version was released recently to address a security issue.  There is a vulnerability in DL and Fiddle in Ruby where tainted strings can be used by system calls regardless of the $SAFE level set in Ruby.

We want to let BitNami users know that most popular Rails-based application installers, virtual machines and cloud images have been already updated and released to include a fixed Ruby version. We continue working on upgrading all of them for all platforms.

Ruby stack, Redmine, GitLab, Discourse, Tracks and Spree with Ruby version 1.9.3-p429 have been already released.

We have also taken this chance to upgrade several core components to their latest version, which we were already were in the process of releasing:

• Apache version 2.4.4
• Passenger version 4.0.2 
• phpMyAdmin version 4.0.0
• Perl version 5.16.3
• Mod_perl version 2.0.8 for Apache 2.4.4

We updated Ruby-based stacks for Linux and OS X platforms. We will update the Windows-based stacks soon. If you already have installed a version of these applications please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patch.

Performance enhancements for Ruby-based stacks in BitNami

We have been steadily working on releasing new applications for our BitNami Library. We have also been investigating new configurations and optimizations to improve the performance of existing ones.

As part of this work we have just released new versions of Ruby Stack, Discourse, Redmine or GitLab with several performance improvements, detailed below:

We added the popular Falcon patches by default, which also include the Greg Price's patch for speedup. These fixes significantly reduce application startup time for Rails-based apps.

To test this improvement, we tested Discourse in an Ubuntu 64 bit small instance in Amazon EC2:

$ time -p bin/rake environment RAILS_ENV=production

Ruby 1.9.3-p392:  69.60 secs
Ruby 1.0.3-p392 + Falcon patches: 22.47 secs

We are also adding specific settings for improving per-application performance. Discourse developers have noticed slowdowns related to Garbage Collection. We configured the BitNami Discourse stack to increase the GC limit to 90 MBs.

We have released a new version of Ruby for Windows that ships similar performance patches. The Code Shop group already implemented these patches for Windows and using this new Ruby version, Redmine starts almost 30% faster for this platform.

In addition to that, we updated the Bundler gem to the latest 3.1.5 version for all the Ruby-based stacks, which is much faster than the previous versions. Now you can run "bundle update" in a few seconds.

If you have additional suggestions on how we can improve the performance of BitNami apps, please let us know!

Discourse: modern forum platform now part of the BitNami library

We are happy to announce that Discourse is now part of the BitNami family! Discourse is a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform built on Ruby on Rails.

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the popular network StackOverflow, solved the Q&A problem by essentially suppressing free-form discussion. He started the Discourse project last year with one goal in mind, to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflict many other forums and comment threads.

You can now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

You can also download free, ready to run native installers for Linux and OS X, virtual machines and Azure & Amazon EC2 images. Discourse was included in BitNami because they were a winner of the BitNami bi-weekly packaging contest. Head over there to vote for the next application to be packaged or to suggest your own.

Discourse forum

Discourse: Meet the last BitNami contest winner

We recently released OpenERP on BitNami and are working on GitLab and XOOPS. Now our users have selected to add Discourse to the BitNami Library as a part of our bi-weekly contest.

Discourse is a recently released open source project that aims to reinvent internet forums and it is "an attempt to reimagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be today".

The project has created some buzz since it was released, in part because Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange is one of the main developers behind Discourse. While Stack Exchange focused on providing users with a quick answer to their questions, avoiding discussions, Discourse tries to solve the opposite problem. For that, hey have added social and real-time twists to forums:

• Conversations, not pages
• Get notifications when you are mentioned
• Simple, but with context
• Remembers your place
• Reply while you read
• Reply as a linked topic
• Real time updates
• And more...

While using Discourse is simple, installing it is not straight forward. We want to change this by simplifying Discourse deployment for everyone, providing free, ready to run, native installers, virtual machines and cloud images. Also as soon as we release Discourse, we will at it to our BitNami Launchpad platform so you can quickly try it out in the cloud with one click.

Discourse, welcome to BitNami!