Changing the invite URL?

So, I just got Discourse up and running (I’m hosting Discourse on a personal machine of mine), and people on my development team are able to access and join the forum … well, they can join but only after I instruct them to change the invite URL they receive in email to my IP Address (I’m aware we’ll eventually need to redirect the site to a different domain name, but this is another hurdle that a friend of mine will be handling).

What do I mean? Well the hostname of my machine hosting Discourse is “epoch-nexus.net”. Currently, the way to access the Discourse site is via my machine’s public IP address. When I invite a new user, they are sent the following email:

Admin invited you to join

[Forum Name]
[Forum Description]

If you’re interested, click the link below:

http://epoch-nexus.net/invites/[random_number]

That’s an invalid URL (“epoch-nexus.net” is not our domain, it’s just the hostname I wanted to give the machine hosting the Discourse forum). Is there a way in Discourse to change the link so it would be “http://[My_IP_Address]/invite/[random_number]”, or to anything else for that matter (as it will eventually need to change to our website’s domain name)?

I can already guess a solution will be to rename the hostname on my machine to the website’s domain, and rebuilding Discourse, but won’t rebuilding cause me to have to go through the Discourse install process all over again? Will it completely wipe the current state of the forum?

You should rebuild with a proper domain name. Discourse is not designed to work from an IP address. Rebuilding just affects global settings controlled by the global config in app.yml, it does not harm any data.

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Good to know that rebuilding doesn’t require a brand new Discourse re-install!

And changing the hostname on my machine and the hostname field in app.yml did the trick, thank you :slight_smile:

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