Install Discourse on Ubuntu or Debian for Development

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729

Personally I would wipe your pi (unless you have anything you want to save) and restart from scratch, or simply start on a clean separate SD card.

Looks like you had two discourse installs - hence maybe the second Redis process.

1 Like
730

rm -rf *? Or is that too destructive?

732

It kinda works now. It takes very long to the load the page, and gives timeouts because it takes too long.

E, [2024-11-08T14:57:11.960623 #2213] ERROR -- : worker=0 PID:2323 running too long (65s), sending USR2 to dump thread backtraces                                                                                                            
E, [2024-11-08T14:57:18.033374 #2213] ERROR -- : worker=0 PID:2323 timeout (65s > 60s), killing                                                                                                                                              
E, [2024-11-08T14:57:20.607509 #2213] ERROR -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 2323 SIGKILL (signal 9)> worker=0                                                                                                                             
E, [2024-11-08T14:57:20.645299 #2213] ERROR -- : worker=1 PID:2324 running too long (63s), sending USR2 to dump thread backtraces                                                                                                            
E, [2024-11-08T14:57:20.645461 #2213] ERROR -- : worker=1 PID:2324 timeout (63s > 60s), killing                                                                                                                                              
E, [2024-11-08T14:57:20.681291 #2213] ERROR -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 2324 SIGKILL (signal 9)> worker=1                                                                                                                             
I, [2024-11-08T14:57:23.676422 #2555]  INFO -- : worker=0 ready                                                                                                                                                                              
I, [2024-11-08T14:57:23.681733 #2556]  INFO -- : worker=1 ready
1 Like
733

Which model pi are you using? I wouldn’t attempt this on less than a pi 4.

It will definitely take some time.

Once the JavaScript is built then issue another browser call. It should then work.

734

It was already (I think It was after the embroider>webpack and the discourse-plugins>apply-patches (something like that)). I’m on a Pi 4.

735

Those workers are unicorns (back end). They look ready. You have to be sure the front end is built too.

And remember to connect on http://localhost:4200

736

How will I know when it has finished building?

737

You get something like:

[ember-cli] Build successful (41838ms) – Serving on http://localhost:4200/
[ember-cli]
[ember-cli] Slowest Nodes (totalTime >= 5%) | Total (avg)
[ember-cli] -+-
[ember-cli] @embroider/webpack (1) | 23127ms
[ember-cli] Babel: admin (1) | 4067ms
[ember-cli] Funnel (422) | 2826ms (6 ms)

(those times are on my mega-PC!)

Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB):

[ember-cli] Build successful (148604ms) – Serving on http://localhost:4200/
[ember-cli] 
[ember-cli] Slowest Nodes (totalTime >= 5%) | Total (avg)
[ember-cli] -+-
[ember-cli] @embroider/webpack (1) | 83461ms
[ember-cli] @embroider/compat/app (1) | 13488ms
[ember-cli] Babel: discourse-plugins (25) | 9313ms (372 ms)
[ember-cli] Babel: admin (1) | 8695ms
[ember-cli] Funnel (407) | 8557ms (21 ms)

Looking at my pi 5 memory, though, it’s already using 4.27GB just with Discourse running and a single Chromium tab open!

So if you are running into heavy swap usage (which itself is a bad idea on an SD card) it will be very slow to get to this point. Check with command htop in another terminal.

You might find running this on a pi with less than 8GB a challenge!

1 Like
738

I think I got that as well.

I’ll run that and get back to you.

739

When it said this:

image
image556×128 13.1 KB

The last amount recorded was this:

Sure, I'd be happy to help you with that image captioning task. (Captioned by AI)
Sure, I'd be happy to help you with that image captioning task. (Captioned by AI)1184×115 20.2 KB

Then it froze (an still is). Likely went over the limit. I closed the browser tab but it’s still frozen. Can’t even CTRL+C.

740

Yep, I’m afraid your little pi needs more memory. Once it is maxed out like that it will freeze.

One option is to add an NVMe drive and increase swap.

You can then increase swap safely.

I think the only other solution is to source an 8GB 5 for this task and use your 4 for something else.

1 Like
741

Good Day

When I type the following command nothing happens:

bash <(wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/discourse/install-rails/main/linux)
The image shows a terminal window with a command to run a script for installing Rails on a Linux system. (Captioned by AI)

Is there something I am missing?

742

Maybe you don’t have wget installed?

Check if you do with

which wget

If not you can probably install it with

sudo apt-get install wget -y
3 Likes
743

btw, I added an NWMe drive this week and my Pi 5 is running great. I also increased swap (which is a slightly different process to a normal linux system)

And most notably this required a complete re-install of a development install of Discourse.

I found following the instructions in the OP things went completely smoothly with no hiccups, so it seems the script and Pi compatibility is in a really good place right now, thanks for all contributions!

6 Likes
745

Hi everyone,

i have set Discourse up successfully on my local Ubuntu 24.04 LTS server for development. The guide worked, both final commands are running without errors.

But how am i able to access it over the network? The Ubuntu server doesn’t have a GUI where localhost:4200 would work.
And ServerIP:4200 shows that it cannot be reached.

Any suggestions how to enable access from networked devices in my LAN?

Thanks!

2 Likes
746

If you start rails with bin/rails -b 0.0.0.0 that should make it available to other hosts on your network. You then would also need to start ember separately in a new tab with bin/ember-cli.

Then visiting ServerIP:4200 should work (unless of course you have some firewall issues).

3 Likes
747

I tried an Ubuntu 24 installation on WLS2. [1]

Here are the issues I ran into:

  • E: Unable to locate package libltdl7-dev

  • Your Ruby version is 3.2.1, but your Gemfile specified ~> 3.3
    With the ruby version bump to > 3.3 recently, the script needs an update as well: install-rails/linux at main · discourse/install-rails · GitHub

    • What I did:
      rbenv install 3.3.7
      rbenv global 3.3.7
      rbenv rehash

  • ERROR Unsupported engine for /home/arkshine/discourse: wanted: {"pnpm":"^9"} (current: {"node":"v18.20.6","pnpm":"10.5.2"})

    • sudo is needed: sudo pnpm install [2]

  • ERROR Failed to switch pnpm to v9.15.5. Looks like pnpm CLI is missing at "~/.local/share/pnpm/.tools/pnpm/9.15.5/bin" or is incorrect

    • When running pnpm install. I was able to fix with:
      • npm install -g corepack@latest
      • corepack use pnpm@latest-9

As non-root, the lack of sudo in the code makes it impossible to run at the end. I don’t know if there is a smart way, but I did not find it. I did not have these issues with Ubuntu 22.
As root, I was able to make it work.

As a side note, there is Developing Discourse using a Dev Container as an alternative.

  1. Because the Ruby bump version now requires v3.3+, I could not fix my installation with Ubuntu 22. ↩︎

  2. If you install as non-root. ↩︎

1 Like
748

About Ubuntu 22, I got it working again. I’m just an idiot. :baymax_yes:

My original issue was that rbenv would contain only the 3.3.0-dev version.
I would get this kind of error:

(base) arkshine@HOME:~/discourse$ rake db:migrate
Sorry, you can't use byebug without Readline. To solve this, you need to
rebuild Ruby with Readline support. If using Ubuntu, try sudo apt-get     install libreadline-dev and then reinstall your Ruby.
rake aborted!
LoadError: cannot load such file -- readline (LoadError)
/home/arkshine/discourse/config/application.rb:44:in '<top (required)>'
internal:/home/arkshine/.rbenv/versions/3.3.0-dev/lib/ruby/3.5.0+0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:136:in 'Kernel#require'
internal:/home/arkshine/.rbenv/versions/3.3.0-dev/lib/ruby/3.5.0+0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:136:in 'Kernel#require'
/home/arkshine/discourse/Rakefile:7:in '<top (required)>'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

The solution is to upgrade rbenv:

git -C ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build pull

Then you can install a more recent and stable version:

(base) arkshine@HOME:~/discourse$ rbenv install --list
3.1.6
3.2.7
3.3.7
3.4.2

rbenv install 3.3.7
rbenv global 3.3.7
rbenv rehash

And now, it’s working again! :party_popper:

2 Likes
749

I just tried to install discourse on Ubuntu 24 (ARM version running inside VMWare on my Mac OS Macbook). I ran into several issues.

Change #1
Installation of ImageMagick fails. In the installation script of ImageMagick itself there is a dependency on libltld7-dev. This needs to be set to libltld-dev instead.

Change #2
By default, Ruby 3.2.1 is installed. This does not work with pnmp v9.x. I’ve set this to 3.3.7 instead, which seemed to work.
old:

ruby_version="3.2.1"

new:

ruby_version="3.3.7"

Change #3
Installation of Node 18 caused some errors. In the installation script I changed this to Node 20, which seemed to work.
old:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo -E bash -

new:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_20.x | sudo -E bash -

Thanks to @Arkshine’s comment further above, that was helpful.

5 Likes
750

With your updates it still works with the current version. Thank you!