Migración de contenedor independiente a contenedores web y de datos separados

:warning: Esta es una configuración avanzada. No sigas esto a menos que tengas experiencia con la administración de servidores Linux y Docker. También debes prestar mucha atención a los commits de discourse_docker para asegurarte de notar si hay un aumento de versión para postgres o redis.

Conversión de tu configuración actual

Logré migrar a dos contenedores. Si alguien más necesita instrucciones, así es como funcionó para mí.
El proceso incluye respaldo, configuración de contenedores separados de web y datos, y restauración de datos.

  1. Haz una copia de seguridad de tu instancia de discourse y descarga la copia de seguridad. Puedes seguir la guía sencilla o respaldar y restaurar manualmente más tarde.

  2. Detén el contenedor independiente actual
    ./launcher stop app

  3. Copia web_only.yml y data.yml de samples/ a containers/ y renómbralos como desees, por ejemplo, web_rocks.yml y data2.yml.

  4. Si los renombras, presta atención a las entradas volumes: en data.yml y web_only.yml
    Si renombraste web_only.yml a web_rocks.yml, debes modificar la entrada en Web_rocks.yml de la siguiente manera:

volumes:
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/web_rocks
      guest: /shared
  - volume:
      host: /var/discourse/shared/web_rocks/log/var-log
      guest: /var/log

De manera similar, haz la edición correspondiente en data.yml.

Configuración del contenedor de datos

Comienza con data.yml y establece una contraseña para la base de datos. Luego:

  • Ve a la carpeta raíz del contenedor /var/discourse
  • ejecuta ./launcher bootstrap data2 (data2 o el nombre nuevo que le hayas dado)
  • ejecuta ./launcher start data2 (usando el nombre nuevo de nuevo)
  • si todo va bien, puedes conectarte al contenedor a través de: ./launcher enter data2 (de nuevo usando el nombre nuevo)
  • Sal del contenedor con exit.

Configuración del contenedor web

Modifiquemos web_only.yml.

Primero, cambia la plantilla y expón los puertos como lo hace tu app.yml.

En segundo lugar, asegúrate de estar enlazando al contenedor de datos correcto. Si renombraste data.yml a ‘algo_mas’, ponlo en name.

# Usa la clave 'links' para enlazar contenedores, es decir, usa el flag Docker --link.
links:
  - link:
      name: data
      alias: data

Aunque ya no queramos exponer ssh ni ningún otro puerto, aún necesitarás exponer los puertos 80 y 443 para el acceso web. Esto depende de si tienes un nginx ejecutándose al frente y cómo conectas el contenedor con él.

En algún lugar de ahí encontrarás este bloque:

  DISCOURSE_DB_USERNAME: discourse
  DISCOURSE_DB_PASSWORD: mypassword
  DISCOURSE_DB_HOST: data
  DISCOURSE_REDIS_HOST: data
  • Ingresa la contraseña que estableciste dentro del contenedor de datos.
  • Ingresa el alias del contenedor de datos que acabas de escribir. Para DB_HOST y para REDIS_HOST. Debe coincidir con el bloque de enlaces que mencionamos.
  • Probablemente no cambiaste DB_USERNAME.

Encontrarás los valores para DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS y DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME y muchos más. Ya tienes estos valores en tu app.yml. Cópialos de ahí.

En la sección de hooks (ganchos), recuerda configurar cualquier plugin adicional que ya uses dentro de app.yml.

Ahora deberías estar listo para hacer el bootstrap:
./launcher bootstrap web_only (de nuevo con tu nombre nuevo/propio)

Una vez hecho el bootstrap, puedes iniciar web_only (usa tu nombre nuevo):
./launcher start web_only

Cuando Discourse esté listo, inicia sesión y restaura tu sitio.

Después de esto, todo volvió a funcionar para mí y mi instalación de discourse se ejecutaba de nuevo, pero ahora en dos contenedores separados.

Cómo actualizar cuando se usan contenedores web y de datos separados

Si no te importan los pocos minutos de inactividad, o cuando los datos necesitan ser actualizados. Los cambios en postgres y redis son infrecuentes, y dejar el contenedor de datos en ejecución es lo que permite construir un nuevo contenedor web_only mientras el antiguo se ejecuta.

./launcher stop web_only && ./launcher rebuild data && ./launcher rebuild web_only

Eso funciona para una actualización menor de Postgres y/o una actualización de redis.

Si te importa cada minuto de inactividad y los datos no necesitan ser actualizados (que es la mayor parte del tiempo):

actualizar solo web_only:
./launcher bootstrap web_only && ./launcher destroy web_only && ./launcher start web_only

Es suficiente reconstruir web_only y omitir data excepto cuando hay una actualización de postgres o redis. Esas ocurren en el orden de una vez al año y verás un anuncio como PostgreSQL 15 update cuando suceda, aunque las actualizaciones de redis y las actualizaciones menores de postgres no se anuncian tan claramente.

Reconstruir los datos requiere tiempo de inactividad (por la misma razón que la versión de contenedor único: no puedes actualizar postgres mientras otro proceso está accediendo a los mismos archivos de base de datos. Además, cuando construyes un nuevo contenedor de datos, debes destruir e iniciar el contenedor web_only porque intentará conectarse al contenedor antiguo).

No necesitas reconstruir el contenedor de datos a menudo (por eso este método ahorra tiempo de inactividad). Debes prestar atención a cuándo hay una actualización en postgres o redis; el front end no lo sabrá; esta es una configuración avanzada que requiere más atención que un contenedor único.

Administración de una instalación de dos contenedores

@pfaffman creará un tema sobre esto algún día, pero mientras tanto, existe esto: Managing a Two-Container Installation - Documentation - Literate Computing Support

42 Me gusta
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This … didn’t work as expected.

(The instructions are a bit off but I followed the update at https://meta.discourse.org/t/faster-rebuilds/40341/4.)

Should the new 2-container installation present an empty/fresh site? I was assuming it would copy all of my settings & data from my app container, but it was brand new. :frowning:

Edit: I did a restore from a backup made just before the process, and it seemed to restore everything. So probably this just needs to be made clear. :slightly_smiling:

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I updated the guide. Hope it reflects your process.

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When someone like @sam puts out instructions to rebuild the “app” container for fixes like this one, is it safe to assume it’s generally going to be in the web_only container?

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Yes, anything that mixes in the template I hacked get this.

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Sorry for the bump on this old conversation, but I had a related issue.

While doing server upgrades that included docker daemon upgrades, docker restarted, but when it did restart, it also restarted the standalone app container, which brought the site back to what it was pre-transitioning to separate containers. After panicking, I stopped the app container, and then started web_only again, and site is back to normal.

But how can I fix this permanently? I tried moving the app.yml file away from the containers folder, but the app docker container still restarts. Should I run ./launcher destroy app ?

P.S. I am mentioning this here, because I did successfully move from a standalone app container to separate data/web_only containers as described here.

Excuse my ignorance but could someone explain to me why this is not the default setup (or an optional setup) in the 30 min install guide?

I understand that using two containers minimizes the downtime during rebuilds and since nobody likes downtime, it seems like everyone would want two containers…

In other words: what’s the catch?

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It’s more complicated to set up? More has to be done during setup? More potential points of failure? Harder to debug if you don’t understand Docker?

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For people like you and me, there is none.

When the 30 minute install was conceived, it involved editing app.yml with a tool like nano (I’m an Emacs user and even I prefer vi to nano). Having people edit copy and edit two files and bootstrap and start both of them in the right order is on the order of 10 times more complicated. Now that ./discourse-setup is how most people configure Discourse, the setup part could be exactly the same for a two-container setup. I’ve looked in to doing just that & it wouldn’t be very hard.

But even still, with two containers, there would then be a bunch of problems with the data container wasn’t running and then no one would say which way their site was configured and that would be a lot more complicated to help out. Most of the time the web-based upgrade works just fine, and so unless you’re changing your plugin config, there’s not that much of a win for the two-container setup.

I think soon that I’ll start offering a two-container setup along side of my $99 install, but I’ve not gotten around to it.

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So is everyone here just pretending that they’re running one container but privately they’re running two?

Well, I guess, maybe even for “people like you and me” it is more convenient with one container, given that you don’t change plugins so often.

On the other hand, on standard troubleshooting advice that keeps coming up is obviously “disable all apps and re-enable them onr by one” and unless you do that by just disabling them under settings, this will give you plenty of downtime with one container…

And when I see that people are talking about 10,000 visits per day, that is quite a few annoyed users, even for half an hour downtime.

Anyway, thanks for explaining. And, yes, you should offer the 2-container install, if only to make it better known :wink:

5 Me gusta

No. Usually if someone posts a problem and they’re running multiple containers, they’ll mention that (probably because it’s a problem specifically with multiple containers), but mostly, if you know how to have multiple containers, it won’t make any difference that you do.

FWIW, it took me nearly 2 years to (bother to) figure it out. And six months of that time I was earning all of my income from Discourse consulting (not to say that the income I earned was a living all of that time).

I’d guess that the vast majority of people running Discourse have a single container. I’d guess that the vast majority of people* who earn some of their income from managing or hosting it* and/or would identify as a “system administrator” run two.

5 Me gusta

It is not that hard too. You have app.yml file which contains both the properties of datasource and web related(which port discourse should run eg 9000, or the plugins config and the custom commands)

So you just divide the app.yml into data.yml and web.yml.
Data.yml will contain the datasources part from app.yml
While the web.yml will contain rest of config.

I usually use nginx webserver infront of discourse.
So I can rebuild another web contianer at say 9001, and reverse proxy to it from nginx.
Then I safely stop the previous web container running at 9000.
This swapping is done in few seconds… So there is no downtime.

7 Me gusta

Could use some help here:

This is confusing. It states to do a step (set a password) but doesn’t state how to do that aforementioned step… and immediately says “then” do some other stuff. Are we missing instructions on setting this password here?

So I didn’t change any password because I don’t know how or what OP is talking about, but did run ./launcher boostrap data and got the following response:

[...bootstrap command running...]
Successfully bootstrapped, to startup use ./launcher start data

prompt$ ./launcher enter data
Error: No such container: data

Note that I didn’t rename anything, only copied the files. I simply have data.yml and web_only.yml in my /var/discourse/containers directory.

Thanks!

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I wrote this “guide” in May 2015. I do not use Discourse any more (stopped soon after). I do not know if any of these instructions still work or how things are done nowadays.

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Thanks, people are still linking to it, going to just hire some help. Cheers!

Thanks for getting it started, we will take it from here!

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Is this still the good tutorial?

Or should follow

or

Right now both of those tutorials still leave me with questions :-/.

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The 3 tutorials apply to 3 different situations, so pick the one that applies to what you want.

Running Discourse with a separate PostgreSQL server is for when you have an external PostgreSQL running somewhere else, like AWS RDS.

Multisite configuration with Docker is about running multiple Discourse instances inside the same container.

And this topic is about using different containers for data and web.

The three guides are for advanced users, and we recommend sticking to defaults for people who aren’t familiar with Discourse, containers and the whole sysadmin lingo.

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well, what i want is to be able to host 3 discourse forums on my own VM.

From that i understand that i need to

  1. Separate the data and web containers (this also brings speedup when rebuilding the app)
  2. Configure 2 other discourse instances (somehow?) for my 2 other forums.

So this is why i don’t know exactly how to approach this situation.

1 me gusta

You may want to do that (mainly to reduce rebuild times), but this is not required, and doesn’t really have anything to do with running multiple sites.

To run three sites, you can either bootstrap them separately (which is rather easy, but triples resource requirements), or use these instructions for setting up multisite:

I’m running a setup like this (i.e. multisite, but without separating data and web containers or any other fanciness), and this works fine, but setup is indeed a bit tricky.

4 Me gusta