Installed Discourse in 30 minutes with no prior knowledge

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Hey,

Wanted to send big thanks to the devs, i was initially scared of all the ssh stuff and the Droplet configuration, but i followed the official guide and set up a self hosted Discourse in 30 minutes.
I have little idea what i actually did there, but bottom line it works :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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Nice! Glad to hear the install guide is still solid, it was originally started by @techapj.

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As a total newbie I can relate to @gerald, even if it took me a bit longer (45 minutes or so, after finding simpler ways to fix mail and LetsEncrypt configuration, also in this forum).

Then a couple weeks later I learned that Digital Ocean offers droplets with Discourse preinstalled, a detail not mentioned in the guide even when it assumes Digital Ocean as ISP… :face_with_raised_eyebrow::smirk:

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Don’t forget you can’t skip the occasional server management tasks though… upgrades and patches and general security fixes. You’ll still need somebody who knows a bit Linux.

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That’s because it forces you into the $20/month droplet due to their rules around not configuring swap. It’s not ideal, since Discourse works just great in the $10/month droplet.

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The instructions are really easy and installation is fast.
I installed it on Google Computer Engine and I guess it took only about 15 minutes or so from start to end.

Thumbs up to the team.

Note:
I initially used Bitnami Discourse image which was running discourse v1.8.10. There was no easy one click upgrade available with Bitnami image.

So, it prompted me to try the official Docker Discourse install.
The newest install seems faster than bitnami image install. Not sure if this is due to the most recent version or Bitnami’s install has some other baggage attached to it.

Issues found while moving from Bitnami image to official Discourse Docker:

  1. Bitnami image uses postgresql version 9.6.5 at this time but Discourse docker is still on 9.5.
  2. While moving with Discourse’s back up restore utility, I got this error from postgresql:

ERROR: unrecognized configuration parameter “idle_in_transaction_session_timeout”

The solution is to modify the sql file that is created by Discourse back up (from postgresql 9.6.5 bitnami image) and comment the line using this variable. This variable was introduced in postgresql 9.6.

I have documented the Move bitnami discourse install to official Discourse docker install, if anybody is looking for it.

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I was setting up discourse for an NGO & it took me about 2 days to set it up with ssl using digital ocean one click install droplet. It took me some time to go through all the docs, somehow I managed to set it up.

Thanks!

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