I’ve set up Discourse forums for several friends/associations. I’d like them to be more autonomous when administering, so I’ll be less likely to intervene myself.
They have been using Discourse as users and co-admins for months or years. They are not “new admins”, but they lack in-depth knowledge on how to maintain Discourse on a daily basis (outside moderation basics) and what should be known, as an admin, and in case of technical troubles, because I was always here to take care of such things.
I’ll still be available in the future, but the goal is to allow them track and address the most common issues by themselves.
Here’s what I wrote so far (IA-translated to English because my text will be written in French, so don’t pay attention if some sentences are weirdly written):
Updates
Via the web interface
Run updates when there is an unhappy red smiley in the admin panel (it means there is an important update to apply).
Updates are done via:
https://tonforum.fr/admin/upgrade
They are sometimes done in two steps: you must first update “Docker_Manager” before you can upgrade the rest:
Via the command line
Sometimes, an update must be done via the command line (the Discourse admin page will explicitly say so if needed).
- Connect to the server via SSH
- Rebuild the forum (a rebuild always updates Discourse) using the following command:
-
/var/discourse/launcher rebuild app - From time to time, once you have confirmed that the forum is working correctly, it can be useful to remove unused Docker images (leftovers from previous upgrades) to free up disk space:
/var/discourse/launcher cleanup
Location of important files on the server
app.yml
Contains the server configuration and the list of installed plugins. Very useful if you need to migrate the forum to another server or apply certain configurations (for example, moving uploads and backups to another disk). It is located here:
/var/discourse/containers/app.yml
mail-receiver.yml
Contains the configuration for the software that allows receiving replies by email and publishing them on the forum. It is located here:
/var/discourse/containers/mail-receiver.yml
Backups
Backup files are stored here:
/var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default
Important pages in the forum admin
Some pages that can be useful 
Themes and components
They include custom CSS and HTML:
https://tonforum.fr/admin/config/customize/themes
Logs
Useful for debugging:
https://tonforum.fr/admin/email-logs
Staff actions
Very useful. It keeps a record of (almost) all site setting changes and other actions performed by moderators and admins.
https://tonforum.fr/admin/logs/staff_action_logs
Error logs
Can provide clues when a problem is not obvious:
https://tonforum.fr/logs/
Backups
To change the backup frequency and maximum number of backups, view them, or download them:
https://tonforum.fr/admin/backups
Resources
https://meta.discourse.org
Official support. Do not hesitate to post there; community members and developers are usually very helpful.
Do you see some things that could be added/removed? I think I can remove the /logs/ part, as it is very, very rarely useful. I’m not even sure I found useful information in it in many years of administering a few instances.