Thanks for your reply, I know that. But I couldn’t get that discourse/base image to run easily with Docker Compose. This new discourse/discourse image makes setup much simpler and just works fine, but I want to understand its purpose and whether I can use it in production.
discourse/discourse is new, but still experimental, so I wouldn’t recommend using it in production. We’ll certainly publish more info if/when that changes, and it’s ready for use.
As of right now, the only method we can support is the standard install.
As described, the Supported way to self-host is to follow the standard install. If you don’t want to do that then you’re sort-of on your own. If you want to launch with docker-compose, what I recommend is to use launcher to build your image, push it to a repo of your own and then use `./launcher start-cmd web_only’ to get the necessary ENV variables and such to launch it. And you’ll still need to do something to see that the database is migrated, assets precompiled, and so on.
You can also contrive to get github to build images for you and have them migrate and so on when launched (as will one day be provided by CDCK, it seems). I’ve done this for clients in the past. (Happy to help if you have a budget.)
If you like to live on the edge, you’re probably pretty safe using the “experimental” version with the caveat that you’ll need to have a staging site where you test each new deployment before pushing it to production and being prepared to either need to wait a while and/or do something that requires deep knowledge of discourse to move forward. A worst case (probably) is that you’d need to be prepared to make a backup and restore to a standard install until the experimental thing is ready for prime time.
Yeah, it’s becoming an open secret of what’s in the oven
You can get a technical preview of what’s upcoming, but like David said we can’t support it officially yet. There are tons of docs to plan, edge cases to test, etc… so we can’t recommend it for production until we smooth those things out.
