First time Discourse installation not showing

Product Support Self-hosting

AI-generated summary

Pieces, a new Discourse admin, installed Discourse on a DigitalOcean droplet following the official guide and encountered an issue: visiting their subdomain displayed a default Plesk page instead of Discourse. They confirmed the DNS A record was set. Canapin suggested configuring port forwarding in app.yml and setting up a proxy rule in Plesk, noting that hosting Discourse alongside Plesk requires extra steps. pfaffman questioned whether discourse-setup was run and whether Plesk was installed alongside Discourse, noting that DNS misconfiguration could also be the culprit. Later, Pieces reported the issue resolved — Discourse appeared correctly on Safari and, after clearing Chrome’s cache and waiting, also on their laptop — suggesting it was either a caching or DNS propagation delay. They thanked the community and anticipated future questions as a new user.

1

Hi all,

New Discourse user/admin here.

I just went through my first installation on a Digital Ocean droplet following the installation instructions provided by on Github.

The Bootstrapping ran without stopping or giving any direct warnings (which I assume is good). However when I now go to my subdomain in a browser it shows a standard Plesk page from my hosting provider where I have my domain registered. I did add the A record in my DNS for the Subdomain.

Any advice on what might be cause this not to work are appreciated.

Thanks and kind regards,
Pieces

2

Do you have access to your Plesk admin?

I host a Discourse forum along Plesk.

I had to do two things.

  • Configure app.yml to forwards ports:
    expose:
  - "8060:80" # fwd host port 80 to container port 8060 (http)
  - "9443:443" # fwd host port 443 to container port 9443 (https)
  • Add the following proxy rule in Plesk admin (in which you need to create the subdomain to be able to add the rule):
    image
    image811Ă—280 14 KB

But I don’t know how your server is configured so this may not work for you.

3

If you do a standard install then it would check your DNS when you want discourse-setup. Did you run discourse-setup?

Did you install some images that includes plesk? Installing with plesk is not very easy and requires some extra steps.

I can’t tell if plesk is the problem or if dns isn’t pointing to your droplet.

4

Thanks for the insights.

I had to step out for a bit and checked the link on my phone (Safari browser) with the surprise message “Congratulations, you installed Discourse”… I just tried again on Chrome on my laptop to result in getting the default Plesk screen again. I removed 24 hours of cache and now it is showing up on my laptop as well.

I guess it was either that or my DNS just didn’t refresh at the time I was trying.

Thanks again, I will probably be around with more “new user” questions.