Could the installation docs address more situations?

Installation
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I’m sure these instructions work well for those who use cloud servers dedicated to the purpose of hosting only Discourse.

But there may be quite a large number who want to install it on hosts that already have web and mail servers running (and understand the stated performance disadvantages).

I realise there is a “documentation” category here where at least some of this information can be found. But to use a discussion forum as a documentation platform isn’t ideal - for reasons I hope are obvious.

If I were to submit a modified installation document to the repo (that is, instructions that still assume Docker and covers cloud servers as is, but also caters for cases with existing Nginx or Apache setups) would that get accepted? It would mean some modifications to the existing INSTALL-cloud.md to make it all readable though.

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There exists documentation. It’s just that you need to understand both discourse and how reverse proxies work.

Set up Discourse on a server with existing Apache sites

Use Nginx Proxy Manager to manage multiple sites with Discourse

I thought there was another for nginx, but wasn’t able to find it in the link search box.

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I agree there’s documentation. It’s just not in a suitable format (or discoverable, as you’ve shown) compared to the way it’s presented in the GH repo.

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Hey @gilgongo , have you looked at Docs ?

To a certain extent the documentation available represents the limited scope of the free support we can provide here.

A fresh VPS at DigitalOcean is a know quantity. This approach allows us to provide steps which are easy to follow, and all but guarantee a working install at the end.

We can’t really account for all of the other configurations of shared server, on-premise deployment and hobbyist install.

If you want to learn how to install Discourse the good news is that the costs of a droplet at DigitalOcean are prorated. A $6 VPS will only cost you $0.20 a day to keep around as a known-good reference while you attempt to install Discourse into a more nuanced environment.

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I have looked at the docs section - in fact I refer to it in my post above.

But I don’t want to rock the boat. I accept you can’t cater for all environments (even if you are using “run anywhere” Docker). I was just curious.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Documentation in a Discussion forum

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Documentation in a Discussion forum

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Sorry, I wasn’t clear: by “submitting” I meant a pull request to the repo in which this lives, not posting to the forums.

I suppose the reasons about discussions not being ideal for docs are the same as the reasons for the “discourse docs” plugin, which plugin seems to address all those reasons very well.

(As an aside, none of this has any relevance to the original question I posted about, which I think nicely demonstrates the problem I was getting at! Irony time.)

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I understood from the start. My answer (and I don’t have any control over any official Discourse repos) is “no.” The recommended solution is dead simple and has as few variables as possible. It’s designed to work for people who haven’t ever used a command line. Once you start putting a “simple” reverse proxy in front of things, the ways that someone can break things explodes exponentially.

It’s not just a matter of untarring (or unzipping) one more PHP directory and adding another file to hosts-enabled. You have to know what a reverse proxy is, understand something about ports, or maybe docker hostnames, and about how to set up https, and set force_https in the container, and adding some magic to make the real IP get through the reverse proxy. It’s hard enough that you don’t want anyone who doesn’t understand at least most of that up front to find it by mistake and then wonder why it’s not working.

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I understood from the start. My answer (and I don’t have any control over any official Discourse repos) is “no.”

Haha, I wasn’t replying to you! This just gets more confusing as we go on, I’m so sorry.

Look - let’s just leave this. Maybe somebody can delete the whole thread. I should not have brought any of this up on behalf of those who can’t install Discourse in the supported manner.

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