In a discussion titled “Install with tailscale magicdns for personal use (Laptop ↔ VPS)” under the Hosting category and tagged as unsupported-install, dontdieych seeks guidance on installing Discourse on a VPS accessible via Tailscale’s MagicDNS (e.g., abc.a-b.ts.net) for personal use, without an SMTP server. The installation hangs at the “Checking your domain name” step. NateDhaliwal advises using a free email service like Brevo for SMTP needs. pfaffman clarifies that while Discourse requires email for production, workarounds exist: skip checks via ./discourse-setup --skip-connection-tests, manually configure app.yml, or use rake admin:create to set the admin password without SMTP. dontdieych confirms success after disabling Let’s Encrypt HTTPS and using the suggested commands. pfaffman adds that enabling force_https via environment variable or site settings may also be necessary. The consensus is that this setup is unsupported and requires manual configuration beyond discourse-setup.
Hi, I want to install discourse on VPS that connected with my laptop by tailscale. For personal note/wiki/journal/whatever.
I can ping/ssh/https to VPS using tailscale’s magicdns. (e.g. abc.a-b.ts.net)
What is recommended way/config on this case?
Currently, installation hang on ‘Checking your domain name’ step.
Thanks for any link or comment.
Email is necessary for setting up a production environment. You can use something free like Brevo (300 emails/day) since it’s just you.
Can’t I skip real hostname check and smtp check?
I’ve got a staging site running on a tailscale 100.x.y.z address. It’s behind traefik (which does https with dns). It’s got real SMTP credentials. I’m not quite sure how it would work with their magic https certs.
There is none. You’re mostly on your own.
You can skip the checks in discourse-setup (which you shouldn’t bother to use–you’ll need to configure your app.yml by hand), but you can’t skip the requirements.
Right. You can’t use discourse-setup. You’ll need to configure stuff by hand. I guess you should be able to use the --skip-connection-tests and other such switches, but discourse-setup is designed for simple standard installs, and this isn’t one.
You might try using mailhog so you can get email.
You might also skip email altogether and use rake admin:create to set your password.
Thanks for reply.
Those two things works as intended. + Turn off https (Let’s encrypt) settings.
Thanks again.
You might also need to turn on force_https. I without so it with sn env variable z but you can do it in the site setting