Is Docker image discourse/discourse considered safe and production-ready?

Installation Hosting
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Hi Discourse team,

We’re currently evaluating the Docker image available here: https://hub.docker.com/r/discourse/discourse

This image was published very recently (less than 24h ago at the time of writing), and I couldn’t find references to it in the official documentation.

My question is:

  • Is this Docker image officially maintained and supported by the Discourse team for production use?
  • Or is it an experimental image that might be removed or changed unexpectedly?

We want to confirm whether it’s safe to rely on this image in our production environments.

Thanks

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I believe the Docker image is https://hub.docker.com/r/discourse/base. (5M+ downloads vs 800+) See:

The Docker repository will always contain the latest built version at: https://hub.docker.com/r/discourse/base/, you should not need to build the base image.

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Thanks for your reply, I know that. But I couldn’t get that discourse/base image to run easily with Docker Compose. This new discourse/discourse image makes setup much simpler and just works fine, but I want to understand its purpose and whether I can use it in production.

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Take a read of:

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discourse/discourse is new, but still experimental, so I wouldn’t recommend using it in production. We’ll certainly publish more info if/when that changes, and it’s ready for use.

As of right now, the only method we can support is the standard install.

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As described, the Supported way to self-host is to follow the standard install. If you don’t want to do that then you’re sort-of on your own. If you want to launch with docker-compose, what I recommend is to use launcher to build your image, push it to a repo of your own and then use `./launcher start-cmd web_only’ to get the necessary ENV variables and such to launch it. And you’ll still need to do something to see that the database is migrated, assets precompiled, and so on.

You can also contrive to get github to build images for you and have them migrate and so on when launched (as will one day be provided by CDCK, it seems). I’ve done this for clients in the past. (Happy to help if you have a budget.)

If you like to live on the edge, you’re probably pretty safe using the “experimental” version with the caveat that you’ll need to have a staging site where you test each new deployment before pushing it to production and being prepared to either need to wait a while and/or do something that requires deep knowledge of discourse to move forward. A worst case (probably) is that you’d need to be prepared to make a backup and restore to a standard install until the experimental thing is ready for prime time.

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Do you have an estimated release date or timeline for when discourse/discourse might be considered stable/production-ready?

Additionally, I would like to confirm: Is the discourse/discourse Docker image open source, and if so, could you provide the GitHub repository link?

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I don’t have any timeline/guarantees right now. But hopefully we’ll have more info to share in the next few weeks.

Yes it’s all open source. It’s built & published regularly by this github actions workflow: discourse_docker/.github/workflows/push-web-only.yml at main · discourse/discourse_docker · GitHub

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Thanks for the info and for sharing the GitHub link, much appreciated!

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Yeah, it’s becoming an open secret of what’s in the oven :slight_smile:

You can get a technical preview of what’s upcoming, but like David said we can’t support it officially yet. There are tons of docs to plan, edge cases to test, etc… so we can’t recommend it for production until we smooth those things out.

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