Comprehensive Guide to setting up Wordpress with Discourse (on DigitalOcean)

Installation
1

I have read so many discussions and articles from DigitalOcean (DO) and a few from this Meta community on how to install Discourse or how to install Wordpress (WP) on one or multiple droplets (via DO).

My question is… What is the most optimized way to set up WP and Discourse to run together, on a single droplet?

I’d love to get some step-by-step help from the community to know the best way to deploy WP/Discourse to be optimized for security, minimal resource usage, etc. It seems the building these on a LEMP stack is a great approach and that’s what I’d like to do… but I’m just not savvy enough to make sure I’m not missing anything!)

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I presume would help many people!

Great conversation and some strong advice from @codinghorror over here, talking about how, as a best practice, Discourse should be set up as a subdomain and not a subdirectory: https://meta.discourse.org/t/wordpress-with-discourse-in-a-subfolder/45087/3 Thanks Jeff!

2

Unless you insist on a sub-folder install, the best and easiest way for most people is to just run two droplets. To run them both, you’ll need 2 GB, so there’s no cost savings. If your traffic is such that you need a 4GB droplet, then it might make sense to use a single droplet.

If you do want to do the single-droplet approach, there are howto documents here for “running discourse with another web server”.

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3

Thanks for the pointers. Would it be considered a best practice, architecturally, to have WP on one droplet, and Discourse on another droplet?

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It’s much simpler from a setup and troubleshooting standpoint, for sure.

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5

If you don’t immediately think, “Oh, cool. I was expecting to crank up a 4GB optimized dropet anyway, I’ll just have my LEMP nginx reverse proxy to discourse on a non-standard port or maybe a socket”, then the answer is, “Yes. The best practice is to use two droplets.”

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