Hi, I have just finished my first Discourse installation on a Ubuntu 22.04.4 server on Proxmox VE (virtual environment). The installation went fine, with no errors, but after finishing it-- the forum site won’t open saying that the service is not accessible. When checking from my network I see the ports as closed: PS C:\Users\mwojt> nmap 192.168.131.211 Nmap scan report for 192.168.131.211 PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 80/tcp closed http 443/tcp closed https But when running the same for localhost from inside the Ubuntu machine it shows as open: root@ubuntu-discourse:~# nmap localhost Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1) PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 80/tcp open http 443/tcp open https However if I run the check the IP address from the same Ubuntu VM to the I see this: root@ubuntu-discourse:~# nmap 192.168.131.211 Nmap scan report for ubuntu-discourse (192.168.131.211) PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 80/tcp filtered http 443/tcp filtered https So, the ports show up as filtered. The ports were opened at the firewall: root@ubuntu-discourse:~# ufw status Status: active To Action From -- ------ ---- 80 ALLOW Anywhere 443 ALLOW Anywhere 22 ALLOW Anywhere 80 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 443 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 22 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) And the Docker port forwarding seems to be set correctly: root@ubuntu-discourse:~# docker port 6922c7802903 80/tcp -> 0.0.0.0:80 80/tcp -> [::]:80 443/tcp -> 0.0.0.0:443 443/tcp -> [::]:443 What do I do wrong? Where is the problem?

I just spent another 90 minutes on installing Discourse. This time on a separate physical machine to rule out the virtual environment and I got an identical issue, even though I carefully followed the instruction from GitHub. Is it just impossible to get this to work??

[image] Marek Wojtaszek: When checking from my network Could the problem be at your end? I see very similar results to you, with my correctly working Discourse instance. Can you reach your instance using a proxy, such as Browserling? Edit: hang on, your address 192.168.131.211 that’s a local address, one would not expect it to be reachable from the world. Edit: what do you see on your discourse host when you try netstat -rn

[image] Ed S: netstat -rn Here is my netstat: root@ubuntu-forum:/var/discourse# netstat -rn Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface 0.0.0.0 192.168.131.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 enp1s0 172.17.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 docker0 192.168.130.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.254.0 U 0 0 0 enp1s0 192.168.131.1 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 enp1s0 192.168.131.152 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 enp1s0 Aside from the Discourse on Ubuntu I installed Talkyard on Debian (Talkyard is a forum engine a bit similar to Discourse), also on Docker, and it is working like a charm. So I think I will try installing Discourse on Debian too. Netstat -rn on my Debian looks like this: root@debian-12:~# netstat -rn Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface 0.0.0.0 192.168.131.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 ens18 172.17.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 docker0 172.26.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.128 U 0 0 0 br-886bebfa13ae 192.168.130.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.254.0 U 0 0 0 ens18 Not sure if this is helpful.

[image] Marek Wojtaszek: the forum site won’t open saying that the service is not accessible I think it’s true that Discourse only works when accessed through a domain, so do you have a setup whereby you can access your site using a browser and a domain? If you are entirely local to your own LAN you can perhaps do that with a hosts file, but I’m not sure. I think both the server and the client (and perhaps also the docker) need to be able to do a name lookup.

I have my local DNS server which is resolving my network name to that host, so it works just like from the external world. I just sucessfully installed Discourse on a DigitialOcean VM. I am going to use it a reference to my local configuration. One think I immedatiely noticed is the hosts file on tha VM - it has the following entry: [image] Hopefully this is it. I will let you know.

Nope, failure… I am completely defeated after 3 days of a struggle and I am tired… :slightly_frowning_face: I start thinking that it is not possible to install Discourse on your local machine, not hosted by a provider :frowning: Check this video I recorded while installing it and please let me know – what I am doing wrong. [Discourse installation failing]

Might be worth trying lsof -i on the server It seems pretty likely that Discourse is running but something about the network situation makes it unreachable.

OK, I found the root cause… I checked the docker logs and it turned out the nginx server does not start at all since it is failing getting Let’s Encrypt Certificate (see the attached logs) docker_logs_not_working.txt (10.0 KB) Now I need to figure out how to fix that. In fact I do not even need SSL as I am using a reverse proxy with its own SSL certificates. So it can easily talk with Discourse over port 80. Not sure if Discourse server will like it.

My DNS is hosted by Cloudflare, so I can easily get my LetsEncrypt certs as I can provide the API key for that. Can I configure ACME in Discourse to make my cert provision work smoothly? I was not able to find in the manual, but maybe I am not searching well.

Ports 443/80 show as closed after installation

Product Support Self-hosting

Jagster (Jakke Flemming) April 20, 2024, 12:41pm 10

If you do searching you will find that is the most common reason why local setups with closed environments, aka. intranets, fails. Discourse needs SSL.

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Ports 443/80 show as closed after installation

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