I am a happy Digital Ocean customer and have a dashboard that my clients enter API keys and a hostname and thenit will automatically create a droplet, configure mailgun, wait for DNS records to be set up, and then install Discourse.
It doesn’t work at all as you suggest. I contacted digital ocean on your forum (I couldn’t find another way) to let you know and my message was deleted. Then, 9 months later you reply here.
Doing it correctly is quite a complicated feat, and the cases that it would be useful are fairly far-fetched. I have a site with 100K pageviews per day on an 8GB droplet. Who do you think is the target audience for this guide?
Yes, you need external redis, postgres, and S3 buckets with a CDN, and the Digital Ocean CDN doesn’t work, so your guide would need to walk them through setting up some other company’s CDN. I don’t think you want to do that. And that’s just getting it set up. If they then want to do an upgrade, it would be a whole other set of procedures that no one else on the planet would know how to help with.
The best thing you could do would be to delete that guide altogether. If you want to be a real hero, you could fix the 1-click install so that it didn’t use your own proprietary script for setting up the email and so on, so that it would actually be a standard install. It’s pretty confusing to have to control-c to be able to get to where Discourse is, and since people who used the one-click didn’t use the standard Discourse tools, they don’t know how to use them when it comes time for a command-line upgrade. It would be really, really great if you could do that.
Here you can see people who used it and were having trouble: Search results for 'digital ocean one-click' - Discourse Meta