Difficulty installing on vm that includes CPanel and Apache

You really don’t want CPanel. It adds nothing and makes it much harder to install Discourse. And if you have it, you can’t follow the NGinx instructions since Apache is already in the way.

If you can remove Apache and CPanel, do that. If you can’t, I’d recommend a different hosting service.

Actually, what you have might not work at all, can you run

 docker run hello-world