Enable a CDN for your Discourse

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

@Discourse

CloudFlare CDN and Discourse have not historically played well together, so we do not recommend running CloudFlare CDN at this time.

Is it still the case nowadays?

From 2019:

S3 image bandwidth costs are getting annoying

I’m using Cloudflare on my Discourse site and it works fine. You basically route all your traffic through Cloudflare and tell it what to process or cache and that’s it. There are a few things to keep in mind though: Configure Cloudflare to NOT cache anything (set up exceptions using page rules, see below). Don’t let Cloudflare touch your Javascript - specifically, turn off Rocket Loader. I’m not sure about Brotli compression yet, I disabled it. Set up page rules to cache the avatar and upload …

It seems we have to be extra careful and that we lose some of Cloudflare benefits.

From 2020:

I can't login to admin after backup due to Cloudflare

Cloudflare isn’t broken, your implementation was. Let’s Encrypt won’t enroll a certificate while CloudFlare is proxying. It prevents the verification from going through. You can’t use any of their ‘performance’ features with Discourse as it alters the already-minified code. All CloudFlare can do for you is hide your IP and act as a CDN for your uploads. The benefits are minimal.

From 2021:

S3 image bandwidth costs are getting annoying

Cloudflare is fine - just disable their Rocket Loader feature. With no configuration effort, it saves half the bandwidth back to my server. It might be that years ago Cloudflare didn’t work well with Discourse, but it’s not true today. It would be nice if we didn’t keep seeing doubt about it. If anyone has a specific problem, they should start a support thread here describing what’s not working.

So, is Cloudflare reliable and efficient with Discourse today? Does disabling the “Rocket Loader” feature minimize the benefits?

I was thinking of moving from Stackpath to Bunny CDN, but the owner of my forum domain and former admin has a cloudflare enterprise account (he’s the owner of tinyURL btw) on which he could add the domain for free (Looking for a decrease in the forum fees in the future - #6 by Gilby - Forum Feedback - Unicyclist.com).

So, I wonder if it’s right, painless and effective to use Cloudflare instead of Bunny CDN.