Install Discourse on a residential internet with Cloudflare Tunnel

[jhary]

Thank you. This guide was very helpful for me, and I appreciate the time you spent to put it together. I also learned that I can use tunnels without an authorization method, so that opens up new possibilities for my homelab game.

[Ar_D (Arpit D)]

I find this quite helpful to start with, I am although using a end user forum, which is easy for me to maintain and moderate. As much as this guide is useful, it’s a little bit hard to understand over text without a exact step by step guide and explanation of each term and resource used here, for a end user like me with pretty basic knowledge about ports and stuff, I just get bamboozled with this guide. Do you have any sort of video tutorials that explains it totally and guides how to do it in monkey terms.
I have a raspberry pi 5 16gb and a pc with i7-7700k, 16gb ram (I usually swap gpu’s as per my use, but it always stays above 12gb vram on this one)for this specific use case . The pc runs win 11 and has much more storage and performance then the raspberry, the reason I want to use it on the pc.

[toeadeep]

@rsmithlal

, but please create a new post from my reply if you feel that it’s off-topic.

so how to get smtp working in this case?

[Sailor]

I’m new to all this, so pondering that these two instructions appear to conflict each other

@Falco

The only change you need is changing the URL from url: http://localhost:8000 to url: http://localhost:80.

@Falco

and add the following line under the env: section:

DISCOURSE_FORCE_HTTPS: true

On one hand, the suggestion is for the tunnel to communicate with discourse via http://localhost:80 but then the setting forces everything via https?

Is the recommendation to work locally on port 80 without SSL, since the tunnel will provide SSL handshake at the edge, and then tunnel to localhost can be without certificate?

I can set up a local certificate with renewals via caddy. Is there a way to provide a config for the key and cert into app.yml?

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what search has turned up for me regarding DISCOURSE_FORCE_HTTPS: true and it’s reflective of links/images being instructed to load via https and has nothing to do on which port/mode Discourse itself runs?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@Sailor

Is the recommendation to work locally on port 80 without SSL, since the tunnel will provide SSL handshake at the edge, and then tunnel to localhost can be without certificate?

Yes.

@Sailor

I can set up a local certificate with renewals via caddy

With a dns verification? It won’t be able to use let’s encrypt with the regular challenge.

If you can get caddy to work, you won’t need to change anything on the discourse side since caddy will still be talk to the http port.

@Sailor

it’s reflective of links/images being instructed to load via https and has nothing to do on which port/mode Discourse itself runs?

Right

[Sailor]

@pfaffman

With a dns verification?

Correct, it’s built in and super simple. But I guess no need for it with a tunnel / proxy.

Thank you for taking the time to help me understand these concepts. Glad to be up and running!