Hosting instructions unclear - possible to install on rented webhosting without sudo?

Hi, its been a long time since I tried to setup anything like this (used to setup things like PHPNuke and whatnot back in the day), a bit of looking around and it seems Discourse is one of the better forum platforms around.

The instructions for installing this are super unclear to me, and I’m not even sure I can install it on the rented webhosting because it seems to require sudo/root which I do not have… is this accurate?

(renting webhosting from NFOServers.com) I’m connecting to the webhosting via Putty
SSH.

Can anyone tell me if this is a thing or not, and if so point me to where I can find a bit more detailed instructions for my scenario (rather than hosting on my own linux machne…?).

Thanks!

You need root privileges and to be able to install docker. I haven’t read the docs lately, but I thought that was clear.

If not, how could they be more clear?

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Why is that? There is no technical reason for requiring root access. Wouldn’t it be possible to have a docker compose file or similar as usual? This breaks compatibility with any kind of enterprise environment, and solutions like podman and Kubernetes.
The nice thing about container is that they are obvious to deploy, as they are packaged in a standard format, with no need to rely on vendor-specific external tool, which is what is happening here. The developers care about making things as easy as possible for sysadmins by providing a tool to support them, but by making it mandatory it makes their task harder.

Bitnami image on DockerHub has twice the number of downloads. I wonder if that is because they are packaged properly (one container for each service, not many services bundled in a single opaque container) and can be run using a compose file.

Not easily. See Can Discourse ship frequent Docker images that do not need to be bootstrapped?

One explanation is that when the project started docker-compose wasn’t really viable, so they developed their own launcher. It’s what they use for their hosting and there’s no reason to change it. The install docs work amazingly well for people who know absolutely nothing about system administration.

I suspect so. And they seem to work for a bunch of people, but if you’re one of those people and something goes wrong, you can’t get (much) help here because it’s not what folks here know about. It’s unclear (to me anyway) what kind of support they can get elsewhere, but often there are exchanges like “To solve that problem, just do X” followed by “I can’t do X because I use bitnami and don’t know how to do that.”

That said, I’ve started working on creating images that are very similar to the supported images but can be deployed with docker compose and similar tools. I’ve recently considered making them as compatible as possible with the bitnami image so it’d be easy to move between them. What I have available isn’t quite ready for anyone to use, as I’m still changing things around; I’m not sure if it’ll be a couple of months or a couple of years.

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Thank you, Jay, for the swift reply on such an old discussion and for the interesting link.

I tried bitnami images, but there are some bugs, and I stopped to reported them when I read that they are just not reading the issues. This is why I would prefer to use the officially supported setup and even contribute in that regard, as I often did with other opensource projects. I would be open to test and contribute to the Docker setup you are working at, if you can share it and think it could be good to open for discussions and contributions.