Hi Jay, thanks for your help. In reply to your questions…
I’m not expecting a lot of users, as it’s a closed Patreon Community. My main goal was to be able to update one server without it taking the site down. I’ve actually confirmed that this is possible, so I was happy with the setup. Yes, I did do step five, so state is being stored on an external Redis droplet.
The other thing that I had to figure out, which held me back for a while, was that I also needed to add the below parameter to app.yml, otherwise, the rebuild kept failing because it was trying to connect to Postgres on the default port, despite having the actual port in the DISCOURSE_DB parameter.
DISCOURSE_DB_BACKUP_PORT: 25060
I hadn’t thought about uploads until after I’d got everything working based on the first tutorial, and initially it did break everything when I tried to set up S3, but that was because the DO Space CDN settings that you guys here provide don’t work.
It specifically states that the Digital Ocean CDN doesn’t work with Discourse.
I know, but then the tutorial has us add this:
DISCOURSE_S3_ENDPOINT: https://sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com
Which comes from the DO Space, right? I have no idea based on all that I’ve read in these tutorials how I would work with a different CDN, but I’m not concerned at this point, as I’ll cover in a moment.
No, I didn’t use a different CDN. I’m actually fine not using a CDN. I will leave the CDN settings empty. As a further update, I based on the advice you’ve all kindly provided so far, I was just going to revert to my backup from last week, but I figured that I’d try enabling the force_https option first, and enabling that fixed the Patreon login issue, as I’d thought it might. Nothing was changed on the server(s) so the Patreon login issue was probably caused by some internal Discourse logic, although again, I realize (now) that I’m doing something that you don’t recommend or support.
So, at this point, my set up is pretty much as the first tutorial recommends, but images and backups are all going to S3, without a CDN in place. It’s working really well. I appreciate that you are recommending I just use the standalone install, but taking the site down for 15 minutes every time an update comes out is really painful. Just yesterday I did find your references to data.yml and web_only.yml for a mulitserver setup, but I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do, so I gave up on that.
I’m going to run with what I have for now. Thanks for your help, and for all that you guys do.