# Rebuild the forum using code?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/rebuild-the-forum-using-code/352173
**Category:** Development
**Tags:** code
**Created:** [February 13, 2025, 11:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rebuild-the-forum-using-code/352173 "2025-02-13T23:04:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![david](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/david/32/157490_2.png) [@david](https://meta.discourse.org/u/david)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2025, 11:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rebuild-the-forum-using-code/352173/2 "2025-02-13T23:14:16Z")

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In a [standard install](https://meta.discourse.org/t/142537?silent=true), Discourse (and therefore, plugins) are running inside a docker container. That container does not have complete access to the host filesystem, so it can’t access the host’s `/var/discourse` directory to modify `app.yml` or run `launcher`.

And even if it could… there’s a bit of a circular dependency here. Running `./launcher rebuild` would kill the docker container… which would kill the `launcher rebuild` which you started from the plugin 💥

There are potential solutions here. e.g. adding additional docker volume mounts, so that the config/launcher can be accessed from within the container. But it’s not trivial.

IIRC someone once made a ‘plugin manager’ plugin… which required some tweaks to the app.yml to add things like the volume mount. But I can’t find any topics about it now, so I assume it’s no longer maintained. Perhaps someone else can share a link if they can find it? (or maybe it was all a dream 😅)

On the CDCK side, we definitely err towards using themes when we want customers to be able to install/update/uninstall at will. Allowing people to arbitrarily install plugins isn’t an option, because that would affect other customers running on the same server.

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