Forem Free Forum Software
Ruby on Rails Based software for building communities
Forem is an open source rails backend software to build and host adaptable communities. Each community will live online as its own independent web application.
Overview
Forem is free and open source software for building a community web application. Forem online communities and forums have its own standalone databases, authentications, configurations with dedicated URL. Alongside this independence, forum community is highly compatible with one another in order to build a cohesive ecosystem for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends where people need to come to be part of a collective together. In forem ecosystem, members of multiple Forems can move between community apps without sharing any data about the individual. Forem rails backend software is currently transitioning to a Preact-first frontend for how to create a community.
Forem open source community building project provides collection of tools and services to help you host independent, focused and adaptable communities. Forem communities are built to uniquely empower the people gathering while keeping discussions active, healthy, and enjoyable. There are more than 20 communities built on Forem online community management software and you might just find one that fits for you to publish your thoughts. snyk.io community built on Forem is a place to discuss all things related to application securirty. dev.to online learning community is also hosted by Forem, is an open source community of beginner to advanced software developers who write posts, take part in dialogues and build their professional network.
System Requirements
The following key app tech and services dependency packages are used to install the Forem best brand communities tech stack:
- Rails 6.1.3.2
- Ruby 2.7.2
- PostgreSQL 11 or higher
- Rbenv for ruby installations
- Yarn 1.x
- ImageMagick
- Redis 4 or higher
- Puma web server
- Sendgrid for transactional mailing
- Mailchimp for marketing emails
- Carrierwave
- Sidekiq 6.2.1
- Devise 4.8
- Preact
- RubyMine editor
- Git for version control
Features
Some of the great list of features and general app concepts of Forem to build community site, online communities and forums are listed below:
- Articles or posts
- Collections or series
- Comments
- Users
- Tags
- Listings
- Credits
- Organizations
- Reactions
- Follows
- Roles
- Visits and Events
- Metrics
- Push notifications
- Notes
- Pages
- Forem feed
- Organization
- Open Source
Installation
Install Forem on Ubuntu
There are many different ways to install Forem for how to build a community but here we will discuss installation steps for Ubuntu. Forem community building project is easy to setup and get started. To get started with Forem for how to create a community quickly, configure and setup Rails development environment with the necessary dependencies packages.
sudo npm install -g yarn
sudo apt-get install libpq-dev
sudo apt-get install g++
sudo nvm install node
Now first clone the Forem repository in ~/forem repository:
git clone https://github.com/forem/forem.git forem
cd forem
Now, run the bundler in project directory:
gem install bundler
Set up your environment variables and secrets. Create .env by copying from the provided template
cp .env_sample .env
The following environment variables can be set:
export CLOUDINARY_API_KEY="SOME_REAL_SECURE_KEY_HERE"
export CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET="ANOTHER_REAL_SECURE_KEY_HERE"
export CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME="A_CLOUDINARY_NAME"
Setup the database and run migrations:
rake db:create db:migrate
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Forem online community management software. Enjoy!
FAQs
What is Forem used for?
Self-hosted Forem allows you to build your own Forem community of software developers on the internet. Open source Forem provides open source tools to help and deploy a thriving, adaptable and fast growing community.
Is Forem free?
Yes, Forem new community web solution is free to use and download to spin up your own Forem community.
Is Forem open source?
Yes, Forem is a fully distributed open source community platform for setting up a free, self-managed community software. Forem source code repository is available at Github.
In what language is Forem written?
Forem is written in Ruby programming language.
How Forem helps software developers?
Forem community allows software developers to share and discover great ideas. Forem helps the early career software developers for learning how to code and to build their professional network.
