alehandrof is seeking a simple way to install Discourse locally on their Mac laptop for troubleshooting Single Sign-On (SSO) issues between Discourse and their PHP-based website. pfaffman advises against this approach, suggesting that a local installation would require HTTPS, which can be complicated to set up. Instead, pfaffman recommends using a cloud service like Digital Ocean.
IAmGav agrees with pfaffman and provides a link to Digital Ocean’s droplets. However, alehandrof clarifies that they have a local copy of their website and had previously used a Vagrant setup with both the site and Discourse using HTTP locally and HTTPS in production.
merefield shares their approach to debugging HTTPS issues, using a cloud dev setup with nginx as a reverse proxy.
I’d like to install Discourse on a local machine to troubleshoot some issues with SSO between Discourse and our PHP-based website. I don’t need to develop Discourse itself and so the guide for setting up How do I set up a local Discourse Development Environment are overkill. (It also fails in a way that I haven’t been able to resolve.)
Is there a simpler way to just get a Discourse up on running on my Mac laptop?
I used to have a Vagrant thing going, but it stopped working awhile back.
You really don’t want to do that.
To do that your troubleshooting machine will need https. For $10/month you can spin up a digital ocean droplet. If you’d rather contrive to make docker work on your mac and configure your router to route traffic to it from the internet so that let’s encrypt can work you can do that. And if you do something other that a real install on your laptop to troubleshoot the problem you won’t know whether you’re troubleshooting the mac or troubleshooting your problem.
I have a local copy of our website as well. I think that wasn’t clear from my original post. To simplify matters the way I had it working with Vagrant, once upon a time, is that both the site and Discourse used http locally and https in production.
For debugging issues involving https callbacks I usually use my cloud dev setup which is based on the local dev env on Ubuntu install but I’ve got nginx in front of it doing the required reverse proxying.
(In my case I use Scaleway)
