There’s a lot of back and forth in this community about using Cloudflare. Some people say it works just fine without any problems and others warn that the sky will fall if they use it. Either way, most of this info is very dated, from 2 years to nearly a decade ago. Personally, I’m using Cloudflare with Discourse here in 2022 without any issue. I’m fully minifying/caching all pages and HTML/CSS/JS, with Brotli compression. I’ve only excluded the /admin from Cloudflare performance as a personal preference. I didn’t turn off the Rocket Loader, but it was already off by default. The only other change I made was to add: - "templates/cloudflare.template.yml" to my app.yml settings in order to restore user IPs. It’s also worth mentioning that the site worked fine before I ever even made a single adjustment.

[imagem] Richard - Communiteq: With respect to caching, I’d say it’s a not a “yay” or “nay” but more like a “meh” :+1: (We need an option to react/like part of a post; how to do it, I don’t have a clue — but then there wouldn’t be reason to write nill-posts like this… :wink: )

[imagem] Richard - Communiteq: With respect to caching, I’d say it’s a not a “yay” or “nay” but more like a “meh”: You specifically mention performance. In my quote, I specifically mention bandwidth saving. These are two different things, and different people will weight them differently.

Hey Richard, the Communiteq link was vague. The message, essentially don’t use Cloudflare. Instead, why not say, if you use Cloudflare, use these settings? Spell it out. I think that’s what oopsyscoops is after as well. Some standard besides, don’t use it. If you turn off performance and allow caching of images, it seems that would be okay. I’m not the pro here though, so that’s why I’m asking. I just like knowing both sides of the issue here. You said caching is meh? If that were true, then why bother with a CDN at all. They cache/store your files in remote locations so users can download them faster from their region. Not to mention, origin bandwidth and server load savings.

[imagem] Brandon: essentially don’t use Cloudflare That’s the advice given by those who manage discourse for their living. [imagem] Brandon: why not say, if you use Cloudflare, use these settings Because that seems to change from time to time. I’m constantly fighting to maintain instructions that help people make mailgun works, for example. [imagem] Brandon: If that were true, then why bother with a CDN at all. Cloudflare doesn’t work like a cdn. It’s something different. If you use a cdn, then discourse uses the CDN for things that should be cached. It doesn’t leave the CDN to guess how to work. Unless you run a community that is likely to be the target of ddos attacks, cloudflare isn’t a good idea. I’ve used bunny.net with a bunch of sites and it’s cheap and easy, though not free.

[imagem] Jay Pfaffman: Because that seems to change from time to time. I’m constantly fighting to maintain instructions that help people make mailgun works, for example. I can respect that right there. I only recently started using Cloudflare for our Wordpress site, and running APO makes a huge speed difference. Unfortunately, as I am about to launch our Discourse forum, the WP-Discourse plugins comment count is not playing nicely no matter which page cache product I use. Our forums not even on Cloudflare (DNS only). I second Bunny, we use it for videos currently.

What I miss in this discussion is the differentiation on WHAT Cloudflare features generate problems. All I have read so far unanimously mentions Cloudflare only as a CDN but as it stands today, Cloudflare is the company and also the name for their PLATFORM of different functionalities (SASE, Network Services, Zero Trust, Analytics, etc). If the caching or optimization part of Cloudflare generates the most problems, then communicate that. But why would using Cloudflare Tunnel with Cloudflare Access to massively increase the security of the Discourse instance be disregarded just because it bears the same “Cloudflare” name?

[imagem] epskpsdsc: All I have read so far unanimously mentions Cloudflare only as a CDN And that’s what the discussion is about. It’s not about any of their other products. It’s just about whether Discourse works in your web browser. When the discussion started, they mostly had just the CDN.

It is only ever implied that this discussion is about the CDN part of the Cloudflare platform. Users currently installing don’t know the history that Cloudflare 10 years ago only (beyond a few other functions) had its CDN. So if this thread should stand to discourage Discourse Admins from enabling CDN functionality in Cloudflare, then you should spell it out clearly, that was my whole point. Else “all” users will be driven away from using other Cloudflare functions apart from the CDN, which doesn’t make sense, only because this thread loosely uses “Cloudflare” as a synonym for “Cloudflare CDN, caching & optimization”.

[imagem] epskpsdsc: So if this thread should stand to discourage Discourse Admins from enabling CDN functionality in Cloudflare, then you should spell it out clearly, that was my whole point. I don’t know how anyone could think that the discussion is about anything other than the CDN. The OP here says [imagem] oopsyscoops: There’s a lot of back and forth in this community about using Cloudflare. They didn’t say “The cloudflare CDN service” but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s what they mean. I honestly don’t know how any of the other services have anything to do with whether Discourse works.

Let’s be clear here. Cloudflare isn’t a CDN. They call a feature of their service Cloudflare CDN, but at a fundamental level that’s not what it does. The two elements which usually intersect with Discourse are their DNS (fine, good even) and their reverse proxy - the orange cloud while using their DNS product. The reverse proxy can cache uploads (which is ok) but can also interfere with the javascript payload delivered to the browser (typically not ok, and the element we’re discussing here). As a reverse proxy it also increases latency for all communication between client and server, which directly impacts user experience. Cloudflare tunnel is mentioned elsewhere on meta and is fine for the application where it’s highlighted.

Discourse e Cloudflare

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