Issues with Discourse 3.5.0.beta2-dev - SMTP and Background Jobs

Bug
15

Here’s a brief report on my successful installation with a question about how to move forward.

I’m still not sure why I had trouble with SMTP in recent attempts. Actually, my first attempt a few weeks ago was successful but I was using a Vultr server that I decided was bigger than I needed and the only way to downgrade was to get a new smaller server and then erase the bigger one.

According to an email I received, the version of Discourse I installed a few weeks ago was 3.4.0.beta4-dev. The email was recommending that I upgrade to 3.4.0.beta4.

Since I had trouble with SMTP in 3.4.0.beta4-dev I thought I would attempt to install an earlier stable version of Discourse. In discussion with ChatGPT (unreliable, I know) we decided to try to install 3.4.1. I thought that version would be stable. Here’s what we wound up installing:

• Discourse Version: 3.5.0.beta2-dev
• Docker Version: 23.0.6
• sidekiq: 6.5.12
• PostgreSQL Version: PostgreSQL 15.12 (Debian 15.12-1.pgdg120+1)
• Redis Version: 7.0.15
• NGINX: 1.26.2
• Ubuntu Version: 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)
• Git Version: 2.39.5

I think that regardless of our intent (that is, my intent assisted by AI) to install earlier stable versions, we wound up installing Discourse 3.5.0.beta2-dev after all.

It was difficult (lots of false starts and using commands given to me by AI to fix stuff that wasn’t working) but my Discourse is finally up and running.

Here are some questions:

  1. Unless I’m mistaken, current users are not yet being encouraged to upgrade to 3.5.0, presumably because it’s not yet fully tested. If so, why are newbies like me more-or-less forced to install it?

  2. I think my version of Docker is old (deprecated). Should I just use the terminal to upgrade to the latest version? Discourse is working now and since I’ve had so much trouble getting to this point, I don’t want to do anything to mess things up.

  3. I think the other software versions are fairly new. If you see anything that may be problematic or that needs upgrading please let me know.

  4. Is there a page or section of this community that addresses technical “care and maintenance” issues? I want to keep my community healthy and working and be prepared with backups, etc. for any problems that might come up.

2 Likes