Last updated for version 0.8.5

If you follow this guide, you should be able to run fully-functional Discourse on Heroku for free (up to a point)

view original README

git clone git://github.com/swrobel/discourse-heroku.git discourse

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev --version=9.2

might as well use Postgres 9.2 although discourse will work with 9.1, which is Heroku's default at time of writing

heroku addons:add mandrill:starter rediscloud:20 memcachier:dev scheduler newrelic:standard

mandrill is for email delivery, although the free mailgun or sendgrid plans will work as well (just update the appropriate config vars). memcachier is for rails cache storage.

heroku labs:enable user-env-compile

This will enable asset precompilation to complete successfully.

1. rake secret
2. copy the output
3. heroku config:add SECRET_TOKEN=<paste here>
4. copy your API key from your Heroku account
5. heroku config:add HEROKU_API_KEY=<paste here>
6. heroku config:add SMTP_SERVER=smtp.mandrillapp.com SMTP_PORT=587 HEROKU_APP=<heroku_app_name>
7. heroku config:add RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=90000000 (per Discourse team's recommendation)

1. git push heroku master
2. heroku run rake db:migrate
3. heroku run rake db:seed_fu

heroku addons:open scheduler

Set up the scheduled tasks as follows:

    TASK                       | FREQUENCY
    --------------------------------------------

    rake enqueue_digest_emails |  Daily               

    rake category_stats        | Daily              

    rake periodical_updates    | Every 10 minutes
                               
    rake version_check         | Daily          

This is the one non-free area. You can get S3 storage for free if you fall under the free tier for 12 months, but you may have to pay for S3 storage. This should be fairly cheap anyway, all things considered. Run the following:

heroku config:add AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your_access_key> AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your_secret_key>

navigate to http://<your-app>.herokuapp.com/admin/site_settings

1. Check the box for enable_s3_uploads
2. Paste your bucket into s3_upload_bucket

I will try to roughly update this repo every 2 weeks, or when there's a new Discourse point release (although at this point versioning is pretty arbitrary). I'm rebasing rather than merging to maintain a clean tree, so you're going to have to force-pull and force-push to heroku.

1. git pull --force
2. git push --force heroku master