Setting up Discourse with SSL on Docker with AWS ELB breaks and returns 503 Service Unavailable (Back-end server is at capacity)

[stroupaloop (Andrew Stroup)]

So I ended up just ditching the ELB as there’s other questions about how to setup duplicate EC2 instances to actually use load balancing and manage asset paths and updates appropriately. I was able to setup HTTPS within Discourse/docker and used an elastic IP.

@riking

Make the directory. Although, actually, as of today, that directory will be made for you now.

Also, I believe that various research indicated that spying is being done on unencrypted backend connections. You should have SSL all the way through, even if on self-signed certs as long as the cert sha-2 fingerprint is verified.

So I was able to get this setup, BUT I used

/var/discourse/shared/web-only/ssl/

INSTEAD of

/var/discourse/shared/standalone/ssl/ as I wasn't sure standalone would work.

Thanks for the clarification!

@hughevans

I like to have the whole domain fronted by a CDN such a CloudFront or CloudFlare and then you can use that to redirect HTTP > HTTPS.

Fair enough, I had some difficulty setting this up and ended up ditching ELB (see above) and just used CloudFront as an asset CDN on a different domain. Basically, I thought I had it setup correctly, but when I’d ping the correct URL which was pointed to an A record ALIAS of the CloudFront, it’d redirect to the ELB URL.

@DeanMarkTaylor

There is actually a /srv/status end point which should return a simple 200 “ok” response.

Thanks! I’ll give this a try instead of the TCP:80/ health check.