I’ve now installed Discourse on 2 different VMs. I’m using the official install instructions. One running Debian 12 in a VMWare Fusion instance on a Mac Pro, the other is Ubuntu 24 in a VM running under TrueNAS. They are both on dedicated servers running on my local network with bridged networks and have unique accessible IP addresses. The TN server hosts multiple other docker containerized apps and they are all working and accessible via LAN and Internet, the Mac Pro natively hosts a wiki. On both, the bootstrap function completes, but I don’t get a working site. Just ‘server not responding’ in a browser. According to docker ps the container “app” is up and running, listening on ports 80 and 443, ufw reports that it’s allowing those ports. For a while the Debian site was showing an nginx default welcome page, but now that’s no longer responding either. I’m not any sort of developer or web wizard so I’m not sure how to troubleshoot, I asked Grok for some help but so far nothing has worked. Definitely appreciate any help given.

[image] tknospdr: They are both on dedicated servers running on my local network with bridged networks and have unique accessible IP addresses. If they are not on the public internet with a domain name pointing at them then you can’t do a standard install. You can look at Install Discourse on a residential internet with Cloudflare Tunnel

I have a publicly available static IP address and a domain name pointing to that address. I generally use a wildcard A record to point any host to that IP but in my troubleshooting I ran across a post saying that Discourse may not play nice with proxied addresses in Cloudflare DNS so I created a dedicated A record and turned off proxy for that one.

[image] tknospdr: On both, the bootstrap function completes, but I don’t get a working site. Just ‘server not responding’ in a browser. Did you run discourse-setup? Did it pass the connection test?

Am I using the term ‘bootstrap function’ correctly? Just want to be sure we’re talking about the same thing. ./discourse-setup IS the bootstrap, right? So if I say it bootstraps, and the container is running, then the connection test, which happens at the very beginning of the setup has passed. Does all that make sense?

[image] tknospdr: ./discourse-setup IS the bootstrap, right? Well, sort of. It creates a app.yml and then runs ./launcher bootstrap app. If you’ve run it a bunch of times without DNS working right then you’ve hit rate limits with let’s encrypt. The easy solutions are to wait a week or to use a different domain name. [image] tknospdr: I created a dedicated A record and turned off proxy for that one. And nothing else is running on that machine? And when you ran discourse-setup it didn’t complain about not being able to connect to itself?

[image] pfaffman: If you’ve run it a bunch of times without DNS working right then you’ve hit rate limits with let’s encrypt. The easy solutions are to wait a week or to use a different domain name. I’ve only run it once on each VM, and I used a different host name for each. [image] pfaffman: And nothing else is running on that machine? Brand new VMs with nothing else running on them. On the actual hardware there are other things running. But they have separate internal IP addresses from their hosts. [image] pfaffman: And when you ran discourse-setup it didn’t complain about not being able to connect to itself? Correct.

Here’s the errors I found in the install output, none look like show stoppers: 690:M 30 Apr 2025 22:05:22.859 # Warning: Could not create server TCP listening socket *:6379: bind: Address already in use 690:M 30 Apr 2025 22:05:22.859 # Failed listening on port 6379 (TCP), aborting. 109:M 30 Apr 2025 21:59:42.411 # WARNING Memory overcommit must be enabled! Without it, a background save or replication may fail under low memory condition... 2025-04-30 21:59:41.125 UTC [60] postgres@postgres ERROR: database "discourse" already exists 2025-04-30 21:59:41.274 UTC [63] postgres@discourse ERROR: role "discourse" already exists WARN: Unresolved or ambiguous specs during Gem::Specification.reset: stringio (>= 0) Available/installed versions of this gem: - 3.1.7 - 3.1.5 - 3.1.1 WARN: Clearing out unresolved specs. Try 'gem cleanup ' Please report a bug if this causes problems. The setting 'staticAddonTrees' will default to true in the next version of Embroider and can't be turned off. To prepare for this you should set 'staticAddonTrees: true' in your Embroider config. The setting 'staticAddonTestSupportTrees' will default to true in the next version of Embroider and can't be turned off. To prepare for this you should set 'staticAddonTestSupportTrees: true' in your Embroider config. Node.js heap_size_limit is less than 2048MB. Setting --max-old-space-size=2048 and CHEAP_SOURCE_MAPS=1 -e DISCOURSE_SMTP_DOMAIN=discourse.example.com [BABEL] Note: The code generator has deoptimised the styling of /var/www/discourse/app/assets/javascripts/discourse/ember/ember-template-compiler.js as it exceeds the max of 500KB. [BABEL] Note: The code generator has deoptimised the styling of /var/www/discourse/app/assets/javascripts/discourse/ember/ember.js as it exceeds the max of 500KB.

What are the specs of your VMs? As in, how many vCPUs/RAM is allocated to them?

Does increasing it to 4 GB RAM help? I think the memory requirements may have gone up.

Cannot get past bootstrapping

Product Support Self-hosting

tknospdr (David Muszynski) May 1, 2025, 8:39am 10

Both have 2/2

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Cannot get past bootstrapping

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