# Setting up Discourse with SSL on Docker with AWS ELB breaks and returns 503 Service Unavailable (Back-end server is at capacity)

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-discourse-with-ssl-on-docker-with-aws-elb-breaks-and-returns-503-service-unavailable-back-end-server-is-at-capacity/29098>\
**Category:** Self-hosting\
**Tags:** docker\
**Created:** [May 21, 2015, 11:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-discourse-with-ssl-on-docker-with-aws-elb-breaks-and-returns-503-service-unavailable-back-end-server-is-at-capacity/29098 "2015-05-21T23:52:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![stroupaloop](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/stroupaloop/32/43099_2.png) [@stroupaloop](https://meta.discourse.org/u/stroupaloop)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 11:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-discourse-with-ssl-on-docker-with-aws-elb-breaks-and-returns-503-service-unavailable-back-end-server-is-at-capacity/29098/1 "2015-05-21T23:52:05Z")

</div>

Back again 🙂 and as always, apologies for my noob devops questions, but here it goes …

I’m trying to setup https for a docker instance of Discourse that’s deployed on AWS. I’m able to successfully run Discourse on AWS using the following setup:

- EC2 t2.medium instance (attached to an elastic IP address)
- RDS postgres db.t2.small (SSD / 100GB)
- ElastiCache Redis server cache.m3.medium (2 clusters)
- SES
- appropriate VPC and Security Groups setup for SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, Postgres (5432), and Redis (6379)

I recently tried to setup HTTPS for the Discourse server and have ran into a few issues, hoping someone has either seen before or I can get help resolving:

I have my key and certs and following AWS’ tutorial, I created an Elastic Load Balancer (to include HTTPS setup), where I uploaded the certs. Some things to note:

- I had to setup the **Health Check** to TCP:80/ because the root URL redirects to /login if not logged in (this is just a note for others trying to do this).

**Discourse docker app doesn’t support listening (at least for ELB) on HTTPS (443).**

- I setup two Listeners: (Load Balancer Protocol \> Instance Protocol)
- HTTP (80) \> HTTP (80)
- HTTPS (443) \> HTTPS (443) \>\> which includes referencing the SSL cert and cipher

**NOTE:** This does **NOT** work. I have to change the second Listener to HTTPS (443) \> HTTP (80) even though I’ve gone into the EC2 server (cd /var/docker/containers sudo nano app.yml) and added in the “443:443” to the **expose:** section.

**Rebuilding the app (sudo ./launcher rebuild app) breaks ELB, causing:**

- the **Health Check** to fail and returns a 503 Service Unavailable (Back-end server is at capacity)
- to resolve, requires the EC2 instance to be removed from the Load Balancer, EC2 instance reboot and reattach the instance to the ELB

I found a thread regarding the 503 error, not sure if it’s 100% the same, but may be helpful for troubleshooting, but this is out of my realm of expertise. \>\> [Forums | AWS re:Post](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=542790)

I started to follow @sam’s SSL + Docker setup ([Allow SSL / HTTPS for your Discourse Docker setup](https://meta.discourse.org/t/allowing-ssl-for-your-discourse-docker-setup/13847)), but I may be missing something because I can’t find the folder

```
/var/discourse/shared/standalone/ssl/

```

instead when I cd / ls through the directory, I get

```
/var/discourse/shared/web-only/

```

with no path to an ssl folder within web-only (the folders available are: backups, log, state, uploads), which is when I stopped and decided to start this thread.

With all this said …

If I have everything configured as noted above in AWS, the outstanding issues that still remain are:

- the Discourse server doesn’t let the ELB listen on HTTPS (443) even if you set “443:443” in app.yml
- I don’t have a good resolution on how to perform updates that don’t break the ELB, forcing me to detach, reboot, and reattach the EC2 instance
- I can’t get HTTP to redirect to HTTPS (am I missing something here?)

I know there’s the setting in Security (below) that sets Discourse.base\_url, but that doesn’t seem to change any actions regarding a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS

![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/6/2/6252af45e75968170ccc23a9e6c946cf9b3bbf9f.png)

Any help on this would be awesome. I feel like I’ve gotten 90% of the way there, just need help identifying how to resolve these last couple of issues 😄

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/setting-up-discourse-with-ssl-on-docker-with-aws-elb-breaks-and-returns-503-service-unavailable-back-end-server-is-at-capacity/29098)._