I do several installs each week; it is not clear what the problem here might be, but it’s almost certainly not one that is on the Discourse side of things. This problem is likely something like getting the IP number wrong or a firewall setting.
Jay I can pay you to do a $99 install test on Azure / Ubuntu Server just to see if it works. No need to bother setting up email, just see if it installs and loads?
I created a DS1_V2 (~$55/month) virtual machine running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I did
wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh
apt -y upgrade
./discourse-setup
It worked just fine.
Oh. You see? I knew there would be head banging. Turns out, not being able to access your machine is a feature, not a bug. You need to open the ports, like this.
Once I managed to convince Azure to open port 80 so that one could access it via a web browser, I enabled Let’s Encrypt and rebuilt. That worked too. (And to make sure that there was no outbound filtering, I sent an activation message with Mailgun. No shenanigans were required.).
I’ve installed discourse several times on azure and it works great. Just wanted to say that yes they can have expensive Linux VM hosting (A1 v2 2GB is $26.79+/month) compared to digital ocean, but if you apply for their BizSpark program you can get 2-3 years worth of $150/month in Azure credits so it might actually be the cheapest hosting solution.
OMG. I tried to log in today to turn off the instance that I started. There is no link (that I could find) on https://azure.microsoft.com/ to actually log in to an account (pro tip: it’s not the “my account” link). Then I found my way to https://manage.windowsazure.com/ which is also not how to find the instance I started up yesterday; maybe that’s just VMs that run Windows? Finally, I found https://portal.azure.com/ and was able to shut down the VM I cranked up yesterday.
My gut reaction is that they’d need to send me a check for $150/month for me to learn to use their services, but that’s probably unfair.
Make sure you deleted everything in the resource group that was created when you made the vm. If you just delete the vm it might have left behind things like VHD’s and storage accounts.
Thanks. That was relatively easy. Some of the complexity of Azure is a necessary side-effect of it’s flexibility. That doesn’t make it any easier for people figure out, though.