Questions about Discourse on Digital Ocean

[ROODAY (Rudhra Raveendran)]

I’m planning on making a discourse server, and at the moment I’m having trouble deciding whether to deploy it on Heroku or Digital Ocean. I know that for Heroku I would have to do all the of the setup work whereas Digital Ocean has a one click install. However, I’ve never used a one-click install and I’m wondering how I would go about configuring and setting up the Discourse forum on such a droplet.

My main concerns are that I already have another webapp that has a PostgreSQL database that contains users’ emails and passwords. I’d like to be able to import those emails and passwords into the discourse database so that users will not have to go through the hassle of making a new account just to use the forums (which are intended to be for discussion regarding the original webapp.) I’d also like to set up English and French localization (does Discourse support i18n?) and also integrate Intercom into the forums.

I guess to sum up my question, does the one-click install just get everything going, and then I could do all the customization I normally would? And how hard would it be to implement localization and importing users to a one-click install?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

We strongly recommend you use the Docker based install as it is the only one we can support.

[ROODAY (Rudhra Raveendran)]

For development purposes, would the small digital ocean droplet size suffice for the docker image? (512 mb ram, 1 cpu)

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

If you even read the docs a tiny bit you will discover the answer to that question.

[ROODAY (Rudhra Raveendran)]

I did, it said “The default of 1 GB RAM works fine for small Discourse communities,” but would any less cause issues if I was only setting up the forum for testing?

[Rodelio_Lagahit (| full stack virgin)]

The one-click install is convenient and will work , but for dev purposes, the one-click DO is an overkill. This is the reason why I chose the lesser DO droplet, and manually installed the app from there.

So far, community is doing fine, but noticed it’s a bit sluggish since my installation is for production already using their 7$ droplet.

[fefrei (Felix Freiberger)]

My main concerns are that I already have another webapp that has a PostgreSQL database that contains users’ emails and passwords. I’d like to be able to import those emails and passwords into the discourse database so that users will not have to go through the hassle of making a new account just to use the forums (which are intended to be for discussion regarding the original webapp.)

This sounds like you shouldn’t make a one-time import but set up SSO:

Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso)

Discourse now ships with official hooks to perform auth offsite. The Problem Many sites wishing to integrate with a Discourse site want to keep all user registration in a separate site. In such a setup all Login operations should be outsourced to that different site. What if I would like SSO in conjunction with existing auth? The intention around SSO is to replace Discourse authentication, if you would like to add a new provider see existing plugins such as: Vk.com login (vkontakte) Enabling …

[zogstrip (Régis Hanol)]

I’d also like to set up English and French localization (does Discourse support i18n?)

Discourse is fully translated in thanks to the hard work of the translators