Hello, is it normal for the site to be offline when installing/updating themes and plugins?

It is normal for the site to be offline when you do a rebuild. Solutions are to use a two-container install, which lets you build a new container, so the downtime is less than a minute, or to contrive to have a “we’ll be right back” page display while the site is down, which doesn’t change down time, but then everyone knows that you’re aware that your site is down. Everyone thinks that at least one of these solutions is too hard and totally not worth the trouble.

Just to add, unlike plugins, installing or updating themes and theme components wouldn’t need any offline time. :+1:

Is there any documentation about the method you mentioned? Also, it seems ironic considering that it is very suitable for SEO in terms of discourse, but there is an interruption during loading and Google bots cannot crawl the site.

How many times do you expect to install a new plugin? This is usually a very rare occurrence. You can update plugins online with tiny interruption to service as containers swap over.

Thank you for the replies. :saluting_face:

Take a look at Add an offline page to display when Discourse is rebuilding or starting up when you feel brave.

Hello :wave: I am not sure and maybe I am wrong (I didn’t try it yet) but this is now a core thing? There is a new template a few month in discourse/templates called offline-page.template.yml and inside it it trigger the GitHub - discourse/discourse-offline-page: offline page for discourse · GitHub. Which is the static html site during Discourse loading. There is also a PR about it in discourse_docker FEATURE: add offline page template by featheredtoast · Pull Request #752 · discourse/discourse_docker · GitHub

Seems like that’d only hit half of it? It’d show up when starting, but not rebuilding, if I understand rebuilds right: Add a template to pull and serve static HTML files from GitHub - discourse/discourse-offline-page: offline page for discourse · GitHub when nginx is available, but rails is not. ^ The github PR

But a step in the right direction, thanks @Don (and @featheredtoast ! ) Yeah @Firepup650 I wondered why I hadn’t seen it, and I believe you’ve answered why! Got some good :male_detective: :male_detective: in here! :slight_smile: I wonder if this is a pre-step to a permanent standard two container setup, where an nginx container is built separately?!??! :thinking:

You caught me - there is some ongoing movement to making serving offline pages more widely possible - the commits and repos mentioned are groundwork for it to be available, but it isn’t (yet) in place now.

The site is offline when installing the plugin

Product Support Self-hosting

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) March 3, 2024, 8:31pm 17

Yes. Down time is usually under a minute, but you’ll need enough ram or swap to rebuild one container while the other builds.

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The site is offline when installing the plugin

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