The Set Up

Good Working Environment

If you are like us and you don't want to use a virtual machine or docker to set up the environment automatically, you need to make sure you have everything you need for contributing to the discourse app. Don't get us wrong, the virtual box and docker are a good way to make sure that everyone is building under the same circumstances. But it also brings in a lot of so called magic.
We consider ourselves learners and prefer to use as little pre-built magic as possible and as much pepared tools as neccessary. So setting up Discourse without Vagrant (the virtual box) and without dockers was our choice, even though it made some things a bit unlinear.
But there is also a good documentation on Github that you can follow.

Discourse Cooking Recipe

• XCode
• Github
• Sublime / Atom
• Redis
• Homebrew
• Ruby
• Rails
• Git Command line
• Postgres
• PhantomJS
• ImageMagick
• local Discourse repository
• Account at Discourse Meta

These will be the basic tool you will need to start. Usually for each of them there are good documentations on how to set them up. But in case you need help, you should also make sure to be able to reach out to someone. The account on Discourse Meta can help a lot, because the community of developers is big and willing to help.
PS. This cooking recipe is made for people who are working on OSX. If you are using another operating system, please go to the Discourse Github profile and look for another set up guide.