Install Discourse on an isolated CentOS 7 server

Community wiki Sysadmins
,
21

Most plugins carry all the code they need and have a simple install. Those two you tried to use need to fetch gems (libraries) from the internet to able to function.

3 Likes
22

do you know where in the code those ruby gem fetches for plugins happen? I tried looking for it but havenā€™t found the right place yet.

Iā€™m thinking maybe instead of using cached gems maybe it would be more elegant to run a rubygems mirror on the isolated host, i found a tutorial here and it looks like you can configure extra system-wide gem sources

https://guides.rubygems.org/run-your-own-gem-server/

1 Like
23

Our internal Discourse has happily been running the same old version for a good long while now, but we are finally getting rid of IE9 so itā€™s way overdue for an upgrade.
I can report that this guide is still good with the latest versions of Discourse. Even with RHEL8 instead of 7 :slight_smile:

While experimenting I figured out a way to get those discourse-prometheus and discourse-calendar plugins working offline too even with the extra dependencies, the trick was to fish out the ruby gems from the plugin directory of the build server as well as the ones in /var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby

docker run -it -v ~/local/rubygems.org:/local-rubygems local_discourse/app /bin/bash -c "cp -rv /var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby /local-rubygems"
docker run -it -v ~/local/rubygems.org/plugin-gems/discourse-calendar:/local-rubygems local_discourse/app /bin/bash -c "cp -rv /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-calendar/gems /local-rubygems"
docker run -it -v ~/local/rubygems.org/plugin-gems/discourse-prometheus:/local-rubygems local_discourse/app /bin/bash -c "cp -rv /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-prometheus/gems /local-rubygems"

and then in /templates/web.template.yml :

  - exec:
      cd: $home
      hook: bundle_exec
      cmd:
        # copy local ruby cache
        - cp -rv /local-rubygems.org/ruby/* $home/vendor/bundle/ruby/
        - cp -rv /local-rubygems.org/plugin-gems/* $home/plugins/
        - su discourse -c 'bundle install --local --deployment --retry 3 --jobs 4 --verbose --without test development'

By the way it looks like the topic for Active Directory IIS SSO got lost at some point, but the code is still available at GitHub - laktak/discourse-sso: Single Sign On for Discourse with Active Directory and still works with the now renamed DiscourseConnect SSO

24

I tried another upgrade and it looks like at some point a new ā€œyarn installā€ section was added to web.template.yml which breaks inside the isolated environment.

- exec:
      cd: $home
      cmd:
        - "[ ! -d 'node_modules' ] || su discourse -c 'yarn install --production && yarn cache list'"

When comparing the contents of the old and new container it looks like thereā€™s a bunch of cached yarn packages on the new one in /usr/local/share/.cache/yarn/v6 but nothing in the old one, I guess all the required node.js used to be included in the base image but now they get updated during a rebuild?

I will experiment with copying out the yarn cache the same way as the ruby cache and see if i can get yarn to use the cached packages from the build box.