Discourse is an open source discussion platform, that can work as a mailing list, a chat room and a forum as well. It is a popular tool and modern day implementation of a successful discussion platform. On server side, it is built using Ruby on Rails and uses Postgres on the backend, it also makes use of Redis caching to reduce the loading times, while on client’s side end, it runs in browser using JavaScript. It is a pretty well optimized and well structured tool. It also offers converter plugins to migrate your existing discussion boards / forums like vBulletin, phpBB, Drupal, SMF etc to Discourse. In this article, we will be learning how to install Discourse on Ubuntu operating system.