TL;DR: Please merge #750. Legacy systems always comes with trouble.
Casually phrased, the instructions do state:
In case anyone else makes the mistake of believing it is just a friendly suggestion, please think again. Any attempt to launch with 1 GiB RAM and 4 GiB of swap will result, not in degraded performance, but in:
Error compiling CSS asset
RuntimeError: Discourse does not support compiling scss/sass files via Sprockets
…/discourse/config/application.rb:190:in `call’
Which according to this thread is a symptom of an insufficient RAM allocation.
Eventually one might also be lucky enough to get a JavaScript stack trace starting with:
FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
So follow the instructions! I’m off to redo this exercise with a freshly created VPS. Rather than attempting to mock around with setting up something as old and outdated, I instead tried repurposing an old decommissioned bullseye one I happened to have still running.
Maybe a second reviewer would wish to look at that PR adding bookworm support, so I’ll be the last sucker getting hit by this?