Hello. According to https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md#domain-name, Discourse requires a domain name, and won’t work from an IP address. Why is this?
We have a domain name, but we’ve been using the raw IP address for development, for privacy reasons until the project is ready to reveal. Is there a way to make Discourse work with an IP address until everything’s ready?
No, a DNS entry is required.
You can set your site to Login Required and turn off registration to prevent users from seeing the site before launch.
Thanks for the reply. Do you happen to know why it’s required? Seems like a rather arbitrary restriction, from the outside.
To be fair using an IP address to “hide” an online application isn’t exactly standard practice. I’ve been building medium to large multi-tenanted web services for a very long time now, nothing gets out of development on an IP.
It’s very common to build on a DNS entry and secure that address either through the product or by implementing basic auth at the web server. You could use a temporary DNS address, but with products such as Discourse that just isn’t necessary.
I’m not sure who would have pitched that as a launch/development strategy. It unnecessarily complicates any testing and eliminates portability.
You can always use manually entered local / internal DNS entries, there’s also “split horizon” DNS.
Thanks for the replies. We decided to go with an in-house solution (not just because of the DNS stuff), but I’ll keep Discourse in mind for future projects.