SamGreenwood created a Discourse instance using the Linode marketplace app and is experiencing issues such as not staying logged in, random 404 errors, and the configuration wizard appearing on the root domain despite the forum being set up. They also have questions about making categories the homepage, installing plugins, and redirecting categories to external URLs. SamGreenwood initially thought the issues were due to DNS propagation but later found that the rebuild process was failing, causing the site to go down. The rebuild errors were traced to formatting issues in the app.yml file, particularly with spacing and the cd and command: lines. After fixing these issues and running ./launcher cleanup, the rebuild process started working again. pfaffman and JammyDodger advised that one-click installs like Linode’s are not officially supported and suggested using the standard installation guide for better support. tobiaseigen provided a solution for setting the homepage to categories via the admin settings. SamGreenwood also mentioned issues with Google Analytics, noting that Universal Analytics is being deprecated. JammyDodger recommended creating a separate topic for the Google Analytics issue to improve visibility and support.
I think that the connection issues were cause by DNS taking a long time to propagate or something not directly related to the install. Because it’s working great now.
The standard install is the one that’s officially supported here on Meta. There are too many variations in the one-click install style ones to be able to provide consistent support for them (and most of the people here are much more familiar with the standard one, which gives a much bigger knowledge pool to drink from )
If you can, you may want to consider getting a digital ocean droplet (or similar) and following the standard install guide, instead of using the linode one.
However, you may still find useful advice and tips if you have a search.
Linode should be fine, but if you use a one-click install (including Digital Ocean’s) then you might not know how to log in to your droplet and edit your app.yml and do a rebuild. But if it’s the same as that, then you’re fine.
The errors mentioned in the first post are not ones that I’d seen before on a standard installation. Maybe you don’t have enough ram?
You could search the site settings for Google. The search on the site settings is a good place to start before searching here. It searches the name of the setting, its description and its value.
It sounds like you may have a typo in your app.yml. Are you making sure to follow the existing formatting when you add the plugin? Ymls are very sensitive to extra spaces, etc.
But would that cause ports on the server to get closed? The Linode support tech I’ve been communicating with said that ports 80 and 443 got closed (and that’s what caused the site to be inaccessible).
The following is the syntax from the plugins section of the app.yml file:
# Plugins go here
## see https://meta.discourse.org/t/19157 for details
hooks:
after_code:
- exec:
cd: $home/plugins
cmd:
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-follow.git
- git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-bcc.git
)