Discourse on a Raspberry Pi

A long standing feature request from our community is finally here! As of today, you are able to host a complete Discourse instance in a $35 Raspberry Pi. You can go ahead and follow our official install guide, and it will work out of the box in any recent Raspberry Pi model.

Demo Site

If you want to check how well it works, there is a demo currently running in a Pi on my desk at https://discourse-on-a-pi.falco.dev/. Let us know in the comments if it's loading fine for you. There is a Single Sign On setup between Meta and the test site, so you can log in seamlessly to test posting too!

Not only on a pi

While the Raspberry Pi is a very well known cheap arm64 device, it isn't your only option when leveraging our new support for this architecture. There are several lists of devices like this one maintained by our friends at archlinux.

"But what about the cloud?" you ask.

We did test running in AWS Graviton 2 instances, like the t4g and c6g family types, and are happy to report that it's working just as well in there too! You can check some options for ARM64 instances in this list here.

Hosting Discourse on your home internet

Got a Pi4 running Debian Bullseye arm64 ready to go, but your home internet doesn't allow you to run sites on privileged ports? Check out our guide at Meta about using Cloudflare tunnel, which we are using to power our Pi-powered demo site.

Thank You!

We would like to thank Loic Nageleisen who added arm64 support to the mini_racer gem for both linux and macOS.