Software you need
The process
I will now explain how to get Discourse running on your local machine so you can begin contributing to the project.
Fork then clone the project. For e.g. Suppose you forked the project to https://github.com/username/discourse then on your local machine you'd do:
$ cd
$ git clone https://github.com/username/discourse.gitNow you'd need to set the upstream repository for submitting your pull requests.
$ cd ~/discourse
$ git add remote upstream https://github.com/discourse/discourse.gitFinally, assuming you have VirtualBox and Vagrant set up correctly you can do the following to get Discourse running:
$ cd ~/discourse
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
# Within the VM
> bundle install
> bundle exec rake db:migrate
> bundle exec rails sNow you can navigate to https://localhost:4000 to see Discourse up and running.
Note: If you receive an error (It appears your machine doesn't support NFS, or there is not an adapter to enable NFS on this machine for Vagrant) related to NFS when running vagrant up you'd need to install nfs-kernel-server and nfs-common. The instruction to do that is sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common.
References