Dear community Digital Ocean Block Storage has been available since some time ago. Because Discourse officially endorses Digital Ocean in their “do it yourself” setup guide, it would be very helpful to have a how-to that explains how to enable Block Storage and use it for image upload. Anyone keen on writing one?

So, I finally spent a few hours to implement all this, and it worked quite well as by the instructions above. I had Discourse hosted in a region with no volumes support, so I also had to move to another region first. Altogether: Turned off the droplet. Made a snapshot. Moved the snapshot to the target region. Created a new dropled from the given shapshot in the target region. Attached a volume and did all the work as described in Digital Ocean. Updated container as by Sam’s recommendation above: [image] Need a how-to guide for using DigitalOcean Block Storage for image uploads Support I would recommend against symlinking, instead, copy images and amend your container config to point /shared/uploads at the correct location. 7. Rebuilt the container 8. Updated all API keys to work with the new IP. For example, I had my SparkPost API key locked to a particular IP address. All done and worked like a charm. References: How to migrate snapshots between regions. How to use block storage with Digital Ocean.

[image] sam: I would recommend against symlinking, instead, copy images and amend your container config to point /shared/uploads at the correct location. Why would you advise against symlinks?

[image] sam: We need to determine performance before making recommendations. Yeah be careful here, everyone, as we found out block storage is quite a bit slower than native SSDs. Like one-half to one-third the speed, so.. [image] sam: the recommendation would be to keep PG on local and images (both docker and pictures) on block storage

So what is recommended? Which CAN we move to volumes without too much of performance loss? Does anyone have a 1-2-3 guide? Everyone in this topic seems to have scattered info for advanced crowds, still hoping to find a simple guide. Let’s say I have /mnt/someStorage/ Edit /var/disocurse/containers/app.yaml section about volumes. Add a -volume … info gets a bit scattered here. Somehow link to somewhere in /mnt/someStorage/somewhere? ?

[image] pfaffman: mv uploads /mnt/volume-sfo2-01/uploads # script’d need to find this Hmm, what do you mean by #scriptd need to find this

[image] dylanh724: volume-sfo2-01 I mean that volume-sfo2-01 might not be the name of your volume.

[image] dylanh724: So what is recommended? Which CAN we move to volumes without too much of performance loss? I’m interested in an official recommendation too. In the meantime, DigitalOcean Block Storage has been working quite well for image uploads for us, except that we do not incur high traffic — just around 200-300k views per month as by Google Analytics.

[image] pfaffman: Docker images don’t get that big if you purge them periodically, so don’t I understand why to bother moving them. What am I missing? I didn’t even know you can purge, and sounds a bit scary to a Linux newb. This is why ;D I can move it and forget it

Here’s how to remove extra docker stuff: ./launcher cleanup You’re really not going to be able to forget it. If you want to forget it, get someone else to do it for you.

If running ./launcher cleanup is “a bit scary to a Linux newb”, you’re really not going to like mounting extra filesystems and moving data around…

Need a how-to guide for using DigitalOcean Block Storage for image uploads

Product Support

techAPJ (Arpit Jalan) June 7, 2018, 4:30am 43

We now have a howto for using DigitalOcean Block Storage:

Topic		Replies	Views
Move Uploads and Backups to DigitalOcean Block Storage Self-Hosting how-to	6	8769	January 3, 2025
How-to guide on DigitalOcean Block Storage for backups? Product Support	15	4695	June 7, 2018
Simple summary of how to move Discourse to a larger disk Product Support	6	160	October 25, 2026
Digitalocean block storage VS amazon S3 Self-hosting hosting	5	3843	July 21, 2020
Making use of added storage volumes Self-hosting hosting	12	5555	August 25, 2017

Need a how-to guide for using DigitalOcean Block Storage for image uploads

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