Best practices for customizing deployment

[aas]

It is common to edit app.yml in order to tweak Discourse settings.

Additionally, in How to avoid throttling limits with admin API key? - #7 by aas I discovered that I need to modify the nginx config to avoid rate-limiting API requests.

My question is, what are the recommended best practices for things like:

• Versioning files such as app.yml
  • I’d need to version it outside of /var/discourse and move it to /var/discourse/containers/ any time I change it.
• Modifying, overriding, or adding new templates
  • templates/web.ratelimited.template.yml is not ignored bit git. While it hasn’t changed for 6 years, editing it directly doesn’t seem wise. It is possible that ./launcher rebuild would clobber it. Or the git pull commands would fail.

Possible solution:

• Create my own git repo with app.yml and a template.
• Write a GitHub action that uses Ansible to copy app.yml into /var/discourse/containers/ and also copies the template to the server running Discourse
  • in this case, I could remove templates/web.ratelimited.template.yml from the templates section of app.yml and replace it with my own template.

Questions

• Where would be a good place to put my custom template?

[aas]

@aas

Where would be a good place to put my custom template?

It looks like I can add replace sections directly to app.yml instead of using templates as mentioned here:

How can I update nginx.conf without resetting it on rebuild?

You have to use replace commands in your app.yml to make the edits to the config files as part of the build process. There’s lots of examples in the discourse_docker repo.

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

Yes you can say with App.yml you can create backup copies and name them as per your needs

If your changing a particular section you can also add comments. Myself as self hosted I have my plugins organized by official, pavilion and other. I add a comment when installing a new plugin in the appropriate section.

Others though may have better ideas than mine.