Before purchasing all the resources, I wanted to try out the website without a domain name, so I used Public IPv4 DNS of that instance as the hostname of discourse and to access the site, e.g. https://ec2_ip_address.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/.
I opened up the port 80, 443 on the instance via the security group, and verified these ports are accessible from public network (tested with python simple server).
But I get “This site can’t be reached” in browser after starting the discourse server with ./discourse-setup or ./launcher rebuild app.
I tried the discourse doctor, and it returns
Discourse version at ec2-ip_address.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com: NOT FOUND
Discourse version at localhost NOT FOUND
I am not 100% sure if email setup is working, but I assume site accessibility is a separate problem with email.
Can anyone point me what is missing or how can I debug this issue?
The Not found status on your hostname is most probably due to the site not being live. You’ll have to share more from your discourse-doctor log.
Does the rebuild/bootstrap complete successfully?
If the EC2 instance is underpowered then there is a chance that discourse would take some time (~3-5 mins in some cases)
What you should be looking at is if your build completes successfully then with docker ps verify that the container is running and listening on 80 & 443. Once that’s verified, the problem is with the AWS security group and not the install itself.
The Not found status on your hostname is most probably due to the site not being live. You’ll have to share more from your discourse-doctor log.
Agreed. I will pay attention to the build log and see if there is something wrong. How can I debug if there is error in the log?
Can you verify that your can access the server via the hostname?
Yes, I verified the hostname and the ports are accessible in browser. both 80 and 443. I created a python http server simply serving some files, and I can see response in the browser
There should be an issue with let’s encrypt and aws. Even if it were your own domain, if you rebuilt a bunch of times you could have used to your quota.
Funny you should mention that. It’s what initially drew me to this topic. I help a lot of people over at https://community.letsencrypt.org and thought this topic might be in my wheelhouse to assist. To apply any of my tools I would need to know the real domain names.
You can register a domain name for $3 at godaddy. If your time is worth more than $3/hour you should register a domain. And if you don’t have $3 to register a domain, you can’t afford an ec2 either.
Sure! See that one one else who uses an .amazonaws.com domain name uses Let’s Encrypt and then wait a week. If you don’t want to register a domain, that would be the next thing that I’d try.
