How would you enable swap for that?
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Discourse-setup automatically creates a swap file.
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Huh, it didn’t for me.
nvm fixed it
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Correct, because your server doesn’t have enough physical RAM. It failed the system requirements check, so installation didn’t proceed.
You need 1GB RAM to install, and a 1GB system will also need swap. You don’t have 1GB, your system isn’t supported.
See:
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I’ve tried this and the old adage rings true: you get what you pay for.
The default is image Oracle Linux, which does not have 1GB as advertised. I used the Ubuntu image that is eligible for the free tier and that did have 1GB. Or rather close enough for Discourse to install.
This was super helpful because I got lost in a maze of contradictory suggestions when following the script’s advice to Google “open ports oracle cloud”.
It was disappointing to see Oracle dropped free SMTP service, but setting up Mailjet wasn’t too complicated. You still get what you pay for, but at least you aren’t paying the price of a byzantine setup. And you’ll need an email provider if you move to a different hosting service anyway.
Having plowed through those troubles, I’m now getting this error from discourse-setup:
Launcher is up-to-date
cd /pups && git pull && /pups/bin/pups --stdin
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/discourse/pups.git/': Could not resolve host: github.com
I suspect I’ve messed something up while fighting with the firewall settings. It looks like this is still an option if you don’t want to spend any money, but I think I’m giving up for now. Hopefully these notes will help others in the future.
Oh. I also got an email from an Oracle sales person just now. Never change, Oracle. 
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That does seem to be the problem. I started over and worked out the kinks. I also wrote up the process on my blog. Gonna try it out for a while as my blog comment system and see how it goes. 
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Just chiming in here - big thanks to Jon and the blog post above he created! That helped me get up and running. Thanks!
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I’ve created an in-depth tutorial to help install Discourse on Oracle’s free plan.
It’s a wiki: feel free to improve it!
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one addition to the free Oracle tier - you can also select the new “Ampere” ARM instances, with up-to 4 cores and 12 GB of RAM in the free tier. Installation of Discourse works without a glitch on ARM processors apparently, and performance is pretty impressive too. Just installed - will see how it holds.
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Interesting! Is that a new addition? I don’t know much about this stuff, but is that like a “standard” virtual machine on which Discourse can be installed as a supported install?
A 4 cores 12 GB RAM for free seems… Weird?
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It’s because it’s ARM based instead of x86_64. And Discourse only recently gained support for ARM.
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The free oracle tier allows up to 2 virtual machines. Does this one takes one space as well?
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Yeah, but I’m with @Canapin. 4 cores and 12 GB RAM sounds like a lot for a free tier, regardless of the processor type.
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Be aware that for this price (free tier) there is of course almost no support, and… well, I’ve been quite disappointed to see that my discourse sandbox had disappeared few weeks ago, without the possibility of creating a new one, the stock of Ampere instances being depleted… 
(but it worked quite well)
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Do you mean that it disappeared by itself, without any action from you, or any warning from Oracle?
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I suspect that what happened here is that there is a free trial. You can trial higher power instances like this for a short time. Then after that, you have to pay.
There is also a very low powered free tier that stays available.
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indeed, that was half of the free tier, 2 ampere vcore and 12GB RAM
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- Ampere A1 Compute instances (Arm processor): All tenancies get the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape, which has an Arm processor. For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory.
I have trouble understanding, but… Does that mean that the more we use its capacity, the more “hours” it spends depending on its specs or something like that?
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