I’ve been trying to install an experimental setup with two Ubuntu VMs to run Discourse, an HAProxy server and a fourth one for Postgres/Redis. The servers are not accessible from the internet - it’s just a test system. The Discourse installation completes but I’m getting stuck with the certs. I’ve got two self-signed certs but I’m clearly doing someting wrong as I keep getting NGINX errors related to finding (or not) the certs when I try to access the site. Has anyone else run Discourse in this way and able to explain how to get things working with the certificates? I’m obviously missing something so this is a call for education, or confirmation that this whole set-up isn’t viable in the first place.

If the server isn’t accessible from the internet then you can’t use discourse to get the certs. You’ll need to get them some other way, and get haproxy to handle the certs. You’ll need to head to a haproxy site for info on how to do that. On the discourse side, you’ll remove the ssl and let’s encrypt templates and make sure that you set force_https somewhere.

I created the certs manually but I haven’t got as far as setting up HAProxy yet. That may be another hurdle to overcome. I’ll do some more experimenting. Thanks.

[image] Octoberon: I haven’t got as far as setting up HAProxy Then I don’t understand your question or your title.

Discourse HA Local Install - Certificate Problem

Product Support Self-hosting

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) February 3, 2026, 12:48am 4

Then I don’t understand your question or your title.

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Discourse HA Local Install - Certificate Problem

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