Discourse with Cloudflare and Digital Ocean

Installation
1

Hello! I’m a newcomer here trying to perhaps start a community with Discourse.

I started my journey with the following How-To on installing Discourse with Digital Ocean:

I already had accounts with Cloudflare so it was natural for me to set up a domain there. After installing Discourse and making progress on setting things up, I hoped to adjust Cloudflare’s SSL/TLS to Full (Strict). I followed this How-To, which left me at a very basic position with Nginx:

At this point I can turn on Full (Strict), and turned on Authenticated Origin Pulls. I just didn’t know how to have Nginx serve as a reverse proxy for Discourse from here.

Sadly, I can tinker on command line to get myself this far, but I am not familiar with Nginx. I did make a few good faith efforts to amend the app file on Discourse to some other port such as 12345:80.

From there I tried following other How-Tos which may not have been precisely for me:

I got stuck. I couldn’t make the changes on my own to get the Reverse Proxy going so I uninstalled Nginx for the time being and dialled down Full (Strict) and Authenticated Pulls.

Does anyone have any additional How-Tos or pointers?

2

Why are you tinkering with Nginx, as the Discourse Docker installation, the default method, contains everything you need as a self-hoster?

Cloudflare works fine with Discourse.

3

I’m not sure if that’s a rhetorical question.

I was trying to follow the recommendations laid out here under Best Practices.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/using-discourse-with-cloudflare-best-practices/602890

I’m new to Discourse and this installation. If there is a How-To for ensuring I can properly turn on Full (Strict), that’s what I am looking for. If there is no need for such a step, then I am open to reviewing anything else that I should do to follow “Best Practices”

EDIT: After considering ljpp’s brief and insightful remark, I reviewed the Discourse installation instructions. I want to point out under the heading 11. (Optional) Add More Discourse Features, the How-To that I was looking for was under “Paid HTTPS / SSL support?”

Once I followed those steps, I EASILY managed to turn on Full (Strict) and I am pleased with the results.

I did not draw a connection that this was what I was looking for. I was accustomed to self-hosting projects as a hobbyist, and I am now enjoying the learning process for Discourse.

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