Digital Ocean + GitHub

Development

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around integrating Digital Ocean with GitHub for a Discourse instance. sinrider wants to create a GitHub repo to manage their Discourse codebase, but is unsure about the base directory due to the use of containers. maiki points out that the Discourse codebase is cloned into /var/discourse according to the install steps.

However, merefield and pfaffman advise against forking the Discourse codebase, as maintaining a fork can be unproductive and is best suited for situations where changes are intended to be contributed back to the main project through pull requests. They recommend using plugins, themes, or theme components for modifications instead. sinrider decides to follow this advice and stick with theme/component/plugin development for customizations.

1

I’ve installed the Discourse droplet on Digital Ocean and I want to create a repo that will allow me to download the codebase, make changes and then upload it back to Digital Ocean. I’m at a bit of loss, since it is being run on containers and I don’t see the base directory for where the site is being hosted from when I SSH into the droplet.

Any help would be great.

2

Hi Lynn. :wave:

From the install steps:

6. Install Discourse

Clone the Official Discourse Docker Image into /var/discourse.

sudo -s
git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse
cd /var/discourse
chmod 700 containers

You will need to be root through the rest of the setup and bootstrap process.

So that repo would be cloned at /var/discourse. :+1:

3

You probably don’t want to do this. Although it might appear to be a great idea at the time, making changes to Discourse is best achieved with its fantastic plugin, theme and theme component architecture its developers have painstakingly provided for our benefit.

Maintaining a fork makes life very boring and unproductive and should arguably only be pursued if you intend to PR within a short timespan.

4

Not boring. But very unproductive. Unless you want to pay up have several engineers whose full time job is keeping up with seeing that your fork still works, you want to use plugins or theme components. The only group that did that was very sorry.

5

Thanks gang. We are going to stick with theme/component/plugin dev for modifications.